Demos Comment: The Prime Minister’s disinformation drive must tackle AI chatbot poisoning
On 22 September 2026, the Prime Minister delivered a speech at the UN General Assembly on mis- and disinformation, in which he announced the creation of a new National Centre for Information Defence.
Responding to the speech, Hannah Perry, Director of Demos Digital, said:
Right now, Britain’s information supply is being written in Moscow and spread by algorithms nobody voted for. The Prime Minister is right to call for a national effort. This is a national security threat, and it ends in real-world harm.
Our research has found Russian propaganda poisoning the chatbots people use every day, disinformation campaigns targeting London, and social media stoking division during crisis moments from the Southport riots to recent asylum housing rows. The door is wide open to these attacks.
We have been calling for a national response and a new centre to coordinate is extremely welcome, but it can’t just mop up the mess. It has to shut the door. Government has other levers it can pull: protect elections from AI manipulation, bring in tougher protocols for crisis flashpoints, and back trusted news by securing the BBC’s future, protecting local news and making sure public interest journalism shows up on social media. The current green paper proposing regulating algorithms to give trustworthy news prominence needs to be implemented.
Some will say this is a threat to free speech. But there’s nothing free about speech written by a hostile state and amplified by a machine. Britain should decide how information reaches its people, not the Kremlin or Silicon Valley.
-ENDS-
NOTES TO EDITORS
Demos is home to the Epistemic Security Programme, a five year, £5m programme, to work on policy to secure the information supply chain to UK democracy.
Demos recently published a report, Epistemic Security: Information resilience priorities for 2026-2029, articulating a long-term vision for Britain’s information environment and how the Prime Minister should lead on democratic resilience and Britain’s Information Resilience Strategy from the centre. Within that, our key recommendations are:
- Elevate the Defending Democracy Taskforce by moving its Secretariat to the new Office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, this should be personally chaired and led by the Prime Minister
- The Taskforce should publish an Information Ecosystems Resilience strategy. This would send a clear signal that threats to our information environment, which AI is fundamentally transforming, are both critical and urgent.
For further information about Demos’ research into emerging AI threats, please see GEO for Geopolitics: What happens when AI and information warfare collide, published in July 2026.
Media Contact
Azzurra Moores, Associate Director, Information Ecosystems. Email: [email protected]
About Demos
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