00:00We actually have, at the moment in Europe, two wars going on.
00:03We've got the Ukraine war, which has got tanks and drones and so on,
00:07but there's another war going on, which is disinformation,
00:10where there are countries trying to undermine our democracies,
00:14our liberal democracies, and we're sitting there like sitting ducks.
00:17I do think we're really complacent.
00:19I met up with a German ambassador,
00:21and he told me what was going on in Germany
00:23in terms of countries trying to interfere in their elections.
00:27We started as a committee going around and taking evidence,
00:31and it's happening everywhere.
00:32And then we saw that these patterns of behaviour
00:35are actually things that we recognise as happening in the UK too.
00:39I think we think that it's only something that affects Eastern Europe.
00:42It doesn't.
00:43A few years ago, there were only a few thousand posts on Reddit
00:48about London being unsafe and violent, right?
00:52And then a couple of years ago,
00:54there were hundreds of thousands with those same words,
00:56and those are bots, and those are bots that are generated by AI.
01:00This is serious stuff, because people are now talking about Londonstan.
01:04I mean, I've been, I've travelled around,
01:06and I've had serious politicians saying to me,
01:09oh, you poor thing, you represent London,
01:11it's run by the Muslims, isn't it,
01:12and it's really violent, and you can't go out.
01:15This is lies. It's lies.
01:18We're actually one of the safest cities in the world.
01:20You know, it's a complete, and this lie has been able to go around the world.
01:25What are we doing about countering this?
01:28We can't just keep sitting back and just going,
01:30oh, I know, it's a worry, isn't it?
01:31We need to hold the social media companies to account.
01:34We can't just carry on dancing around them.
01:37You know, the responsibility does lie with them.
01:39If they know that I like green furry shoes,
01:42they know when there are bots coming in using disinformation
01:47and being used by bots to target information into the UK,
01:50I do not believe they don't.
01:52Tell me what you're calling on the government to do after this report.
01:56The first thing is, is the Foreign Office in many ways
01:59is doing a great job in countering disinformation internationally,
02:01but it doesn't have enough resources.
02:03So we need to be able to do what we did in Moldova,
02:06in many other countries, starting with Armenia,
02:08that has elections just happening.
02:10But there are many other countries,
02:11and actually Britain can really help
02:13to fight this hybrid war that's going on.
02:17So that's number one.
02:18Number two, we have to talk about the fact
02:20that it's happening in this country too.
02:21We have to talk to the public about it.
02:23We have to give more examples, concrete examples,
02:26of the sort of campaigns that happen
02:28so that people can learn to identify
02:30when they're being lied to.
02:32There should be a national disinformation centre
02:34which gathers this stuff together,
02:36which is public-facing,
02:37which will say,
02:38we've got another one,
02:39look at this, guys,
02:40you know, so that people understand.
02:43We need to hold the social media companies to account.
02:46We can't just carry on dancing around them.
02:48We're very�ievers,
02:48we go to diplomacy and 사람이 companies to account.
02:48So you can try to keep sharing
Comments