Small EU countries such as Ireland are not safe from the threat posed by information manipulation from hostile countries, a top European Commission expert has warned.
Lutz Gullner, attached to the EU diplomatic service, told a conference in Dublin that “nobody is safe” and that it doesn’t matter if a country is “big or small” as disinformation campaigns are transmitted in the digital world, not the physical one.
Speaking via videolink, the head of strategic communication at the European External Action Service (EEAS) said that each member state, regardless of its size, needs to have a national disinformation strategy and a “clear leader”.
In a special report in the Irish Examiner last week, security sources described Ireland’s approach to tackling disinformation as “very confused”, with a number of agencies operating in the area, but no overall strategy or co-ordinating body.
Ireland was due to publish the country’s first national counter-disinformation strategy by March, but it is now expected before June.
Addressing a conference organised by the Institute of International and European Affairs, Mr Gullner said Russia was the “most visible” perpetrator of disinformation in the EU.
He said some of Russia’s information manipulation has also involved suspected corruption of elected representatives to the European Parliament, with a number of investigations underway into alleged payments to MEPs.
Mr Gullner said the target of Russian disinformation “is shifting all the time”, being traditionally focused on Eastern European states and Baltic countries. He said these countries have built up “quite significant resilience” and that the campaigns are currently hitting Germany and France.
Asked if this meant small countries, particularly neutral ones like Ireland, would not be a target, he said: “The key message I would like to pass on is nobody is safe from this, big or small, because it doesn’t work with ‘big and small’ it works with digital means and it doesn’t matter whether it’s big or small, because you can reach people.”
He urged all member states to be “wary” of this threat and for each country to define what the problem was, did they want to tackle it, and how.
He said this requires “structures and strategies” and that, in his personal opinion, “there needs to be somebody in charge”, as it crosses so many different departments, including communications, digital policy, foreign policy, national security, and other areas.
Mr Gullner said there was a risk of disinformation campaigns during the current European Parliament election campaigns and other elections (Ireland is also having local elections on the same day, 7 June).
“Countries need to be prepared, but we don’t want to overstate this threat,” he said. He said that if voters believe elections will be interfered with anyway, it might stop some from voting — which, he said, was “what the attackers want”.
Mr Gullner said AI was making disinformation, such as fake videos and fake audios, “easier, faster and cheaper” as well as “more professional and sophisticated”. He said: “Can we actually trust our eyes and ears anymore, the better these things are being done?”
He said it was important that the threat from AI disinformation should “not be hyped too much” and added that the technology can also be used to detect machine-produced content as well. He added that countering disinformation was not about controlling freedom of speech, but the “protection” of it.
