This report provides an up-to-date assessment of interventions intended to disrupt Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI), and suggests how practitioners might make more informed decisions about using them. It aims to enhance practitioners’ understanding of how to disrupt FIMI operations and why they should do so. It addresses three main questions:
- What role can, or should, disruptive measures play in counter-FIMI operations?
- How effective are disruptive responses in countering FIMI?
- How can decision-makers better understand context in order to determine whether and how to disrupt FIMI operations?
The report also summarises existing research on counter-FIMI in the areas of situational awareness, building societal resilience, communicative responses and cooperation. As it will explain, beyond fact-checking and media literacy, evidence of most counter-FIMI measures remains limited. However, several principles are widely accepted. These include the importance of strong situational awareness to identify and track FIMI campaigns; the need for a ‘whole of society’ or ‘multi-stakeholder’ response in which governments, platforms, media outlets and civil society cooperate, and the need to avoid a binary distinction between foreign and domestic influence.
