Information Warfare

// Information Warfare

Carl has spent a decade investigating how information spaces became theatres of war — the disinformation and foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) campaigns that make up the information front of hybrid warfare. From inside Britain's information warfare machine to state-aligned hacktivist groups coordinating attacks against Western critical national infrastructure, his work has taken him to NATO summits, seen Russian-aligned hacker groups arrested, and produced D-RAIL — a strategy for disrupting malign influence. At the think tank Demos, he has led more than 40 major research projects tracking conspiracy theories, disinformation and electoral interference.

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GEO for Geopolitics

The newest front is the manipulation of AI itself. Carl's latest Demos report, GEO for Geopolitics (with Hannah Perry and Flynn Devine, 2026), maps how information warfare is turning on the AI models everyone now asks for answers — treating AI not as a tool of FIMI, but as a target of it. It found a sanctioned Russian influence operation surfacing favourably in five frontier AI models.

The full explainer: AI manipulation →

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D-RAIL

Carl is the author of D-RAIL — Directing Responses Against Illicit Influence Operations, a strategic framework for fighting information warfare by disrupting the operations behind it rather than chasing their content. D-RAIL shifts the target from disinformation itself to the infrastructure, funding and personnel of illicit influence operations: articulate the operation's chain of influence, develop counter-activities to break it, monitor and evaluate, learn and evolve, and hold the whole effort to capability and ethical standards. By aiming at specific illicit operations rather than speech in general, it minimises collateral impact on the wider population — a response to information warfare designed to be compatible with democratic values.

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Writing & Research

• GEO for Geopolitics: What happens when AI and information warfare collideDemos
• #Intelligence — the paper that coined 'SOCMINT'Demos
• Truth, Lies and the InternetDemos
• The Power of UnreasonDemos
• Wikipedia has resisted Information Warfare, but could it fight off a proper attack?New Statesman
• Meeting Kosovo’s Clickbait MerchantsBBC
• Inside Britain’s Secret Information Warfare MachineWired
• The real - and sinister - reason Farage is sprouting conspiracy theoriesThe Guardian
• China and Taiwan Clash over Wikipedia editsBBC
• Fringe Medical and Political groups exploiting the Corona VirusBBC
• What are ‘bots’ and how can they spread fake news?BBC Bitesize
• Nation States exerting power onlineTwitter Blog
• Stop Saying Ukraine is winning the information warThe Atlantic
• Focusing on ‘disinformation’ causes more problems than it solvesWorld Politics Review
• Possible Russian Information Operations during the Invasion of UkraineCASM
• Introducing Social Media Intelligence (SOCMINT)Intelligence and National Security
• Towards the Discipline of Social Media IntelligenceDemos
• Developing a Civil Societal Response to Online ManipulationISD
• Delay, Deny, Delay: Documenting and Responding to Climate Disinformation at COP26 and BeyondISD
• Information Warfare on WikipediaBeam
• Identifying Sock-puppets on Wikipedia: A Semantic Clustering ApproachBeam
• Beam: Defending InformationBeam
• China's Digital DiplomacyCREST
• Hate of the NationOfcom
• Tangled WebOfcom
• Islamophobia on TwitterDemos
• Addressing Quality in Social Media ResearchJournal of Social Research Practice
• A Question of TrustDemos

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Selected Media

• Wikipedia Infiltrated by Pro-Chinese EditorsBBC Click
• Can AI Steal Your Vote?Channel 4 Dispatches
• The Hidden Front Lines of the War in Ukraine — Cyber Warfare ExplainedDocumentary
• Putin and the Age of the StrongmanDocumentary
• Deep Fakes and the Infocalypse — with Nina SchickPodcast
• How Extremists are Taking Over — with Julia EbnerPodcast

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