Disinformation units: who watches the watchers?

Series: How minds are moved · Censorship, enforced and invisible · 2 of 7

In March 2020 a British soldier from the army’s 77th Brigade was told he would be hunting Russian and Chinese propaganda about the new virus. One of the first search words he was handed was ventilator. What he found, he later told the civil-liberties group Big Brother Watch, was not foreign agents but frightened British nurses and ordinary users. “It was simply fear and domestic dissent,” he said. The Ministry of Defence said the brigade’s work was internationally focused and never targeted British citizens.

Both statements are on the record. That gap, between a unit built to fight foreign lies and a unit that ends up reading its own citizens, is the subject of this post.

Contents · 8 sections

TL;DR #

• Since 2015 many governments have built units to find and counter “disinformation”: the EU’s East StratCom Task Force (2015), the UK’s Counter Disinformation Unit (renamed the National Security Online Information Team), the US Global Engagement Center (closed 2024) and Disinformation Governance Board (2022, lasted four months), France’s Viginum (2021), Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation.
• Foreign influence operations are real and documented in court papers and official reports.
• The documented problems are also real: files on journalists and MPs in the UK, Dutch media wrongly listed by the EU unit in 2018, US politicians and scholars listed as “Russian narrative” speakers by Ukraine’s centre in 2022.
• At the far end, Russia’s “fakes” law and China’s Piyao rumour-refutation platform show what a truth unit looks like with no outside check at all.
• The weak point is oversight. Most of these units were set up by ministers, not by laws, and the public learned what they did through data requests, leaks and lawsuits.

Why the units exist #

The case for them is strong, so it comes first. In 2018 a US special counsel indicted 13 Russians and the St Petersburg Internet Research Agency for running fake American accounts during the 2016 election. In 2023 France’s Viginum exposed the Russian “Doppelganger” network, which cloned the websites of real Western newspapers to spread invented stories. In February 2024 it described “Portal Kombat”, a network of 193 sites pushing pro-Russian content into Europe. Just this week, on 9 November 2026, Reuters reported an internal EU assessment saying a covert Russian network had tried to exploit France’s October riots by blaming them on immigration; a separate French foreign ministry assessment it saw also looked at accounts from Israel and the US “MAGA” movement amplifying the unrest. On LSN News, my news engine, that story ran in 16 languages across 74 outlets in its first days (https://lsn-news.shuffle-on.com/s/391953).

So somebody has to watch. The question is who, under what rules, and who watches them.

The units, one by one #

The EU: East StratCom and EUvsDisinfo (2015) #

After the annexation of Crimea, EU leaders asked in March 2015 for an action plan against Russian disinformation. The result was the East StratCom Task Force inside the EU’s diplomatic service, and its public database, EUvsDisinfo.

Its documented misstep came in 2018. It listed articles from three Dutch outlets (GeenStijl, The Post Online and the regional daily De Gelderlander) as pro-Kremlin disinformation, partly because of a translation error. The outlets sued. On 6 March 2018 the Dutch parliament voted for a motion asking the EU to scrap the project. Two days later the task force withdrew the cases and published a retraction. The lawsuit was dropped. The unit survived; the episode showed that its labels could hit domestic media of a member state.

The UK: from Counter Disinformation Unit to NSOIT #

The Counter Disinformation Unit sat in the culture ministry and became widely known during the pandemic. In January 2023 Big Brother Watch published Ministry of Truth, a report built on people’s legal requests for their own files; it is in my library. It documented that:

• the unit and a Cabinet Office “Rapid Response Unit” flagged posts to platforms, and that a Twitter employee wrote in 2020 that the company was “speaking regularly” with the unit;
• files mentioned journalists, academics and MPs, including an Oxford professor of evidence-based medicine, Carl Heneghan, whose critique of out-of-date lockdown charts was monitored and rebutted;
• the ministry paid an AI firm, Logically, more than £1.2 million for “mis/disinformation monitoring”.

The government’s position was that the unit looked at trends, not individuals, and did not tell platforms what to remove. After the criticism it was renamed the National Security Online Information Team, focused, officials said, on foreign state threats. Big Brother Watch called the rename a rebrand.

The US: the Board that lasted four months, and the Center that closed #

On 27 April 2022 the Department of Homeland Security announced a “Disinformation Governance Board”. Critics compared it to Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. It was paused on 18 May, its director Nina Jankowicz resigned the same day, and on 24 August 2022 the department terminated it. DHS said its role had been “grossly mischaracterized”.

The State Department’s Global Engagement Center, created in 2016 to counter foreign propaganda, wound down in December 2024 when Congress did not renew its mandate. Its successor office was closed on 16 April 2025 by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said it had spent millions “to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans”. Former officials denied it and said it had worked only on foreign propaganda. Critics of the closure, quoted by Defense One, said it left the US largely without defences against foreign influence campaigns.

Ukraine: the list of “speakers” (2022) #

In July 2022 Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation, part of its national security council, published a list of “speakers who promote narratives consonant with Russian propaganda”. It included US Senator Rand Paul, then former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, journalist Glenn Greenwald and political scientist John Mearsheimer, for statements such as “NATO provoked Putin”. A country at war has obvious reasons to fight Russian propaganda. But putting foreign politicians and academics on a state list for their opinions drew criticism across the spectrum, and the list was later removed from the centre’s site without explanation.

Russia and China: when there is no outside check at all #

The units above were caught drifting by parliaments, courts, data requests and leaks. In some states there is no such check. Russia’s March 2022 law on “fakes” about the armed forces turned the Defence Ministry’s account of the war into the legal definition of truth: contradicting it carries up to 15 years in prison, and it has been used against people who simply called the war a war (post 5 of this series has the cases). China has run a national rumour-refutation platform, Piyao, since 2018, operated by the internet regulator with the state news agency Xinhua. It publishes official rebuttals of “rumours”. The same logic, applied by police rather than the platform, reprimanded the Wuhan doctor Li Wenliang in January 2020 for “spreading rumours” about the illness that became COVID-19; the authorities withdrew the reprimand after his death. In both cases the body that decides what is false is the government itself, with no independent court, parliament or data-access route to challenge it. That is the far end of the same spectrum, and it is why oversight matters more than intentions.

What it feels like from the inside #

If you are watched, you usually do not know. The people in the UK files found out only because they asked for their own data. Heneghan learned that his radio comments had been logged and rebutted. A pub owner who opposed vaccine passports, without making any claim about the vaccines, found his tweets filed under disinformation.

If you work in such a unit, the feeling is different. You believe you are protecting people from something real, and sometimes you are. The soldier’s testimony shows how the job can drift: the keywords came from the day’s newspapers, and anything not clearly foreign “could be a foreign agent”.

What these units can and cannot do #

They can expose real operations, as Viginum did with Doppelganger. They can give platforms evidence to act on. They cannot, legally, order removals in most democracies; that is why the issue is “flagging” and what counts as pressure (post 3 of this series).

The documented risks come from three places. First, the definition drift from disinformation (false, on purpose) to misinformation (false) to malinformation (true but considered harmful). Second, the lack of a law: most of these units were created by ministers, with no statutory duties to publish what they flag. Third, politics: whoever is in power decides who the unit watches. In 2025 a new US administration, whose supporters had been among those flagged, closed the remaining office.

How to notice it #

• Ask who flagged it. When a post is removed, check whether the platform’s transparency report lists government or “trusted flagger” referrals.
• Read the unit’s legal basis. If you cannot find a law, a budget line and an oversight body, it is a ministerial unit with few checks.
• Watch the vocabulary. “Harmful narratives”, “malinformation” and “consonant with propaganda” describe opinions, not falsehoods.
• Use your data rights. In the EU and UK, a subject access request can show what a public body holds on you. That is how the UK files came out.
• Check the other direction too. A unit that never names an operation by its own side’s allies is telling you something about its scope.

Frequently asked questions #

Are disinformation units censorship? #

They are not censorship by themselves; most cannot order removals. They become part of censorship when their flags lead platforms to remove lawful speech, and the evidence on how often that happened is partial and disputed.

Were foreign influence operations exaggerated? #

Some specific claims were, and some operations had little measurable effect. But the existence of operations like the Internet Research Agency and Doppelganger is documented in indictments, domain seizures and official reports.

Who oversees these units now? #

It varies. In the UK, parliament questioned ministers and civil-society groups used data requests. In the US, Congress let one office lapse and the executive closed another. In the EU, the task force answers to the diplomatic service and the European Parliament. In no case I found is there an independent body that reviews each flag.

Is the UK unit still running? #

It exists as the National Security Online Information Team, inside the science and technology department, with a stated focus on foreign state threats.

The lesson #

Every unit in this post started with a real problem and a reasonable mandate. Several of them were found, by a parliament, a data request, a lawsuit or a leak, to have drifted at least once: toward domestic media, toward their own citizens, toward opinions rather than falsehoods. The fix the record suggests is not to trust or distrust the watchers, but to require what any other power requires: a law, a public list of what it flags, and someone outside the government who checks.