The Covid-19 pandemic has caused unique societal stress as governments worldwide and their citizens have struggled to work together to contain the virus and mitigate its economic impact. This has been a trying time for democracies, testing the capacity of democratic governance to mobilise state and citizenry to work together. It has also tested the integrity of open information environments and the ability of these environments to deal with the overlapping challenges of disinformation, misinformation, election interference and cyber-enabled foreign interference.

Covid-19 has spurred the world into a new era of disinformation where we can see the daily erosion of credible information. Individuals, organisations and governments are increasingly fighting for the value of facts. But the global information environment was home to bad-faith actors long before the pandemic hit, from states interfering overseas or misleading their own populations with targeted disinformation to conspiracy groups like QAnon and alt-right extremist groups. Some of these groups have leveraged legitimate public concerns related to the pandemic, vaccine rollouts and issues like data privacy to build new conspiracy theories, and Covid-19 has provided them with a bigger platform to do so.

Relationships between governments and social media platforms are increasingly strained. Divisions are deepening about how to best balance free expression while dealing with the public harms caused by mis- and disinformation and speech that incites violence or hatred, and how to best tackle rapidly emerging issues such as the proliferation of manipulated content and the risks caused by increasingly sophisticated deep-fake technologies that could mislead and erode trust in institutions.

Policymakers are also increasingly frustrated at seeing authoritarian states, particularly China and Russia, leverage US social media networks and search engines to project propaganda and disinformation to an increasingly global audience. This is particularly perplexing, as the Chinese state, for instance, bans these same platforms at home and both limits access to and censors foreign embassy accounts on Chinese social media platforms.

The online ecosystem allows a range of state and non-state actors that are already manipulating the information environment for strategic gain to shift from exploiting the pandemic to disrupting and undermining trust in Covid-19 vaccine rollouts. This shift will only further tear at the already tense relationship between democratic governments and the major technology platforms. Anti-vaccination, conspiracy-infused misinformation disseminated across social media has mobilised public opposition to vaccine programs in several countries.  January’s Capitol Hill riot in Washington demonstrated the potential for online mobilisation to transfer offline and manifest as violent civil unrest.

This is not the public square we want or need, especially as the world seeks to return to some version of normality in 2021.

From elections and state actors to 24/7 cyber-enabled interference

Governments have had more success at raising public awareness about online election interference than other forms of such intrusion. Since the Russian meddling in the 2016 US election, democracies have been concerned that the legitimacy of their mandates could be tarnished through election interference, although this preoccupation has distracted from authoritarian states’ broader efforts to shape the information environment.

ASPI’s research on cyber-enabled interference targeting electoral events has identified two predominant vectors: cyber operations, such as denial-of-service and phishing attacks to disrupt voting infrastructure and/or to target electronic voting; and online information operations that attempt to exploit the digital presence of election campaigns, voters, politicians and journalists. Together, these two attack vectors have been used to seek to influence voters and their turnout at elections, manipulate the information environment and diminish public trust in democratic processes.

ASPI’s research identified 41 elections and seven referendums between January 2010 and October 2020 where cyber-enabled election interference was reported. There has been a significant uptick in this activity since 2017, with Russia the most prolific state actor engaging in online interference, followed by China (whose cyber-enabled election interference activity has increased significantly since 2019), Iran and North Korea.

Following several high-profile incidents of election interference, there is now a proliferation of multi-stakeholder forums designed to coalesce public and policy attention around malign online activity leading up to and during elections. But an exclusive focus on the interference that surrounds elections is problematic. Information operations and disinformation campaigns—that exploit the openness of the information space in democratic societies—are happening every day, across all social media platforms.

In the Philippines, researchers and investigative journalists have repeatedly shown how the Duterte administration has continued to rely on the influence-for-hire market of bloggers, trolls, inauthentic accounts and online influencers to create and promote pro-government content and help distract citizens from issues such as the government’s handling of Covid-19. Social media platforms are showing a growing willingness to publicly attribute such activity. In September, Facebook linked the Philippines’ military and police to the removal of a network of domestically focused fake profiles, consisting of 20 Instagram accounts, 57 Facebook accounts and 31 Facebook pages.

And it’s not just states that spread disinformation. News outlets, fringe media and conspiracy sites—some with significant global reach—are also guilty of deliberately misleading their audiences. For example, in December 2019, Facebook took down more than 800 accounts, pages and groups linked to the conservative, Falun Gong–affiliated Epoch Times for misrepresentation and coordinated inauthentic behaviour.

Governments that shift their attention to these issues only in the lead-up to and during an election miss the bigger strategic picture as malign actors consistently target the fissures of social cohesion in democracies. Some strategic actors have aspirations that are much more global than influencing an individual country’s election outcome. While governments have spent the last few years (re)building their capabilities to counter foreign interference, they are struggling to handle the different set of complicated challenges—from online attribution and enforcement, to protecting citizens from harassment and threats from foreign actors—posed by cyber-enabled foreign interference outside of election time. One issue is that, unlike with traditional foreign interference, the responsibility for action is distributed across the platforms and government agencies. In many countries, unless there’s an election to focus on, government leadership has fallen mainly down the cracks between intelligence, policing and policy agencies.

The Chinese state’s flourishing interference and disinformation efforts

Given authoritarian regimes’ limited capacity to absorb social unrest peacefully, including in cyberspace, the pandemic has threatened stability. The emergence of Covid-19 from Wuhan created the risk of domestic political instability for the Chinese Communist Party. The party-state’s international standing was endangered by the spread of the virus and the resulting global economic disruption.

So how did the CCP respond to this challenge as Covid-19 spread? It threw itself into a battle of information and narratives, much of which played out online and continues to evolve today. At home, it suppressed and censored information about the virus. Open-source researchers and citizen journalists in China who had been collecting and archiving online material at risk from censorship were detained and had their projects shuttered.

China’s censors also sent thousands of confidential directives to media outlets and propaganda workers, curated and amended trending-topics pages, and activated legions of inauthentic online commentators to flood social sites with distracting commentary. One directive from the Cyberspace Administration said the agency should control messages within China and seek to ‘actively influence international opinion’.

The effort to influence international opinion, which remains ongoing, relied on a very different toolkit to the one wielded at home. US social media networks were central, providing the ideal platform for China’s ‘wolf warrior’ diplomats, state media outlets, pro-CCP trolls and influencers, and inauthentic accounts to boost and project the CCP’s narratives, including disinformation about where the virus originated. They also provide the perfect space for this collective of online actors to try to undermine critical reporting from Western media, research institutes and NGOs, and smear and harass researchers and journalists, whose work provided facts and analysis in stark contrast to the propaganda being disseminated globally by the CCP.

The Chinese state’s large-scale pivot to conducting information and disinformation operations on US platforms occurred across 2019 and 2020. As the pandemic spread, the Chinese state found itself ideally positioned to experiment with cross-platform and multi-language information activity that targeted overseas audiences and largely amplified Covid-19-related and political narratives.

But the efforts of the Chinese state lack the sophistication of others that engage in this online behaviour, such as Russia. For example, the Chinese state makes little effort to cultivate and invest in rich, detailed online personas, and it lacks the linguistic and cultural nuance needed to build credible fake influence networks. Despite this, the Chinese state’s information efforts are persistent. While it may have focused on quantity over quality thus far, given the enormous resourcing the CCP can bring to developing this capability, quick improvement can be expected. The Chinese state also brings an alignment in tactics and coordination—among diplomats, state media outlets, co-opted foreign fringe media organisations, and pro-CCP trolls and influencers—that no other state can match.

Stronger defence and models for collaboration

Covid-19 and the CCP’s efforts to control and shape international information flows about the pandemic through online propaganda and disinformation have made clear just how easy it is for malign actors to manipulate open information environments.

Harder choices will have to be made about how to protect our information ecosystems better and how to deter and impose costs on the many malign actors seeking to exploit it. This will require governments to work more closely with the platforms and civil society groups to ‘defend forward’ to counter and disrupt malicious information activity. There is also a lucrative market of influence-for-hire service providers, to which state actors can outsource propaganda distribution and influence campaigns to obfuscate their activities. These commercial actors are increasingly part of the fabric of political campaigning in many countries. However, the lack of transparency around these activities risks corrupting the quality of democracy in the environments in which they operate.

Globalisation and the openness of democracies make these acute challenges, as their openness has left democratic states vulnerable to threats of interference and subversion. Much of the thinking around cyber-enabled foreign interference has been framed by Russian meddling in the 2016 US election, yet other strategic actors are able to exploit disinformation campaigns and information operations in powerful combination with other levers of state power. China, for instance, has interwoven disinformation with its diplomatic and economic coercion of Australia in retaliation for the Australian government’s call for an independent international inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Given the cross-cutting nature of this challenge, diplomacy and policy are fundamental to pulling together like-minded countries to engage with and contest cyber-enabled foreign interference and the actors—state and non-state—that spread disinformation for strategic gain. Social media platforms have been a front line on this battlefield, and it is often the platforms that must detect and enforce against state-linked information operations and disinformation campaigns that exploit their users. Yet, the platforms are driven by different motivations from national governments.

Multilateral and multi-stakeholder approaches must be encouraged to facilitate the defence of democracy as a system of governance and values. This is particularly important in the arc of states from Japan down through Southeast Asia to India, many of which have fast-growing economies but fragile democracies, and where the Chinese state’s power projection has the potential to influence a long-term drift away from democratic governance.

There are models for collaboration between states in pushing back against interference. The European Centre of Excellence in Countering Hybrid Threats draws together expertise from across the EU and NATO to facilitate strategic dialogue on responding to hybrid threats, developing best practice, building capacity through training and professional development, and joint exercises. NATO Stratcom is another centre of excellence that combines both strategic and tactical expertise from across the alliance in collective defence against disinformation and information operations.

These models could be replicated through the Quad grouping of Australia, India, Japan and the US. The alignment of interests among these countries could provide an important vehicle for building structures like those that have been trialled elsewhere and offer resilience against cyber-enabled foreign interference. This should include multi-stakeholder 1.5-track engagement that brings together governments, civil society and industry; mitigates against the splintering of economic and national security interests; and drives greater investment in civil society capacity building around detection, strategic communications and digital diplomacy. Social media networks and search engines must do a better job at deterring and punishing actors that actively spread disinformation on their platforms and should audit what they categorise and promote as ‘news’.

Finally, there is strength in democratic collectives. Governments themselves can take steps to mitigate the risks of cyber-enabled foreign interference, but democracies can increase their power by banding together to attribute, raise costs and deter interference by other states. States targeted individually may be reluctant to escalate grey-zone aggression. However, where there’s a collective response, adversaries are likely to recalibrate their behaviour in the face of collective actions like diplomatic measures and economic sanctions.

This is an abridged version of Danielle Cave and Jake Wallis’s essay for the Observer Research Foundation’s 2021 Raisina Dialogue. For the full paper, including detailed policy recommendations, click here.

With an estimated two-thirds of women in Papua New Guinea subjected to domestic violence, business, civic and military leaders are working with a formidable Australian couple to deal with a practice that’s devastating the social fabric of a key nation on Australia’s doorstep.

Gender-based violence—being ‘bashed up’—is occurring in crisis proportions and is having a debilitating impact on the population, which flows on through the economy and adds to PNG’s vulnerability.

Last year, the government in Port Moresby released its Papua New Guinea national strategy to prevent and respond to gender-based violence, which says that while clear data on levels of this—violence is scarce, surveys from individual areas came up with proportions such as 65.5%. The government said: ‘It provides evidence to indicate that urgent action is required.’ Many believe the figure of 65.5% is an underestimate.

In the strategy, Prime Minister Peter O’Neill says gender-based violence is a worldwide phenomenon but: ‘This form of human rights violation is occurring at an alarming rate in Papua New ­Guinea.’

He says ‘it must be stopped’ and promises ‘our collective effort will stamp out this epidemic before it is too late’.

Chillingly, the report says: ‘90% of women in prisons in PNG are serving time for murder. They acted in self-defence in response to family violence.’

An earlier government report on prospects for economic development says PNG cannot reach its potential if inequality continues to exist. ‘Victims are not well reported due to cultural issues and fear. There is a need to increase the ­capacity and effectiveness of enforcing agencies and institutions to protect and cater for victims.’

Local business leaders say domestic violence costs them hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Stephanie Copus-Campbell has been closely involved with PNG for 18 years, first as an Aus­AID official and now as chief executive of an oil industry organisation, Oil Search Foundation, which implements projects in PNG focused on health, education and women’s empowerment.

Approached by local community leaders, she asked Australia’s former sex discrimination commissioner ­Elizabeth Broderick for advice on how to promote change in a distinctly male-dominated society. The local leaders were aware that to effect change they had to involve men as well as women.

The answer, says Broderick, is to harness a high-profile male who had publicly condemned acts of domestic violence in Australia, one of her ‘male champions of change’. An excellent choice, Broderick says, is very close to home: Copus-Campbell’s husband General Angus Campbell, chief of the Australian Defence Force.

Apart from being aware of PNG’s strategic importance, the special forces officer has his own strong interest in helping Australia’s northern neighbour.

He lived in PNG as a child and went back there regularly. He agreed to take part with his wife and Broderick in a leadership forum funded by the Oil Search Foundation to launch a world first private-public program to tackle family and sexual violence.

The forum is part of a broader initiative called Bel isi PNG (A Peaceful PNG), which taps the abundant resources in the business community to prevent domestic violence and improve services for those experiencing it.

Senior PNG military officers quizzed Campbell on the weakening impact domestic violence can have on the culture of a military force and asked him to come back to PNG and talk to the troops about it. Following Campbell’s visit, PNG Defence Force commander Gilbert Toropo, Police commissioner Gary Baki and players from the NRL’s Brisbane Broncos, who have a huge following in PNG, have all committed their support to the Bel isi program. PNG military and police chiefs will join a walk next month to strengthen the message to their own men in uniform that bashing up women has got to stop and it must be taken seriously as a crime.

Port Moresby Governor Powes Parkop is a key driver of change in PNG and he’s initiated 8 kilometre Sunday morning hikes across the city to get the populace healthier and to demonstrate the need for public safety, especially for the hundreds of women and girls who take part.

More often than not, Copus-Campbell is the only expat on these walks but it’s where, she says, ‘the magic happens’ as Papua New Guineans find their own solutions to gender-based violence.

At the leadership forum in Port Moresby, Campbell delivered the same message he’s aimed at perpetrators of domestic violence in Australia, that self-discipline, respect and decent behaviour have to start at home. That domestic violence costs in terms of missed work days, loss of productivity and workplace occupational health and safety concerns. That you don’t want someone flying an aircraft, driving a vehicle, or operating machinery if they’re in serious emotional or physical pain or distracted about whether they’ll be safe when they get home.

As chief of the ADF he was conscious that skills, knowledge, weapons and communication systems made the modern soldier the most lethal ever fielded. That meant that more than ever, perpetrators of family and domestic violence are fundamentally at odds with the meaning and profession of soldiering, Campbell says.

‘When one of my people engages in the illegal and ill-disciplined use of violence at home, in training or on exercise, my confidence in them to execute their duties lawfully and discriminately in circumstances of immense stress on the battlefield is deeply undermined,’ he says.

‘They are not living by Australian Defence Force values: I see cowardice, not courage; comfortable habit, not the initiative to break the cycle. I don’t trust them to respect the innocent, the weak and the wounded, nor to serve the team rather than themselves.

‘This is why family and domestic violence is a war fighting capability and workplace issue.’

Some PNG army officers join Parkop on his walk on the following Sunday and, as they amble along amid a mass of women and girls, they tell Copus-Campbell how inspired they are by what her husband had told them and that they are determined to act on it.

PNG navy captain Philip Polewara tells The Australian he and his fellow officers are grateful that someone as busy as Campbell is willing to come from Australia to talk to them.

He says: ‘Ours is a very masculine society and in many parts of PNG the man is everything. We have to get our men to understand the importance of the role of women, and we appreciate General Campbell and his wife coming to advocate for them.’

Parkop says his goal is to use the capital as a base to change his country. Nearly all of PNG’s 1,000 tribes and 860 languages are represented in the city, which makes it an ideal place to start. The program to end domestic violence is critical to the city and the nation, he says. ‘The biggest challenge is people not respecting themselves. We can build infrastructure, but unless we change attitudes, society will continue to fail.’

Having role models such as Copus-Campbell and Campbell willing to come to PNG is crucial, Parkop says.

‘Stephanie is passionate about PNG and it’s very important for us to hear what Angus is doing for the Australian Defence Force.’

During her time in PNG, Copus-Campbell has been appalled by the impact of extreme ­violence on women and children, and some men.

As the campaign to stop it gathers momentum, there’s been a remarkable response from business leaders who have long wanted to do something but felt the problem was too big to deal with.

Copus-Campbell attributes her own passion about the issue to the emotional stress of seeing many friends and colleagues struggle with it and the increasing burden it has placed on the organisations she’s led. She’s dealt with numerous cases where members of her staff have not come to work for days, or have left work, or have not been able to focus.

A staff member recently missed work for more than a month. When Copus-Campbell was finally able to find her, she discovered the woman had been badly injured in a domestic dispute. She was too ashamed to explain the situation, and had instead stayed home and risked losing her job.

‘As terrible as these stories are, I am excited about how things are slowly starting to shift,’ she says. ‘Thousands of Papua New Guineans are standing up to say enough is enough. They are taking leadership in their families, communities, churches, businesses, government departments and cities to drive change.’

An early experience in PNG that has haunted Copus-Campbell occurred in her first days there when she was in a small hospital in Western Province and met a young mother who had been badly beaten by her husband.

‘She pulled back her shirt and showed me her terrible injuries. She said she came to the hospital because giving birth to her child was the last time she had felt safe.

‘She saw me as this foreign lady, someone with power, someone who could save her. She begged me to help, telling me that if she went home her husband would kill her and her baby.

‘There was nothing I could do. Not a thing. I was in town for a few hours. I knew nothing about the justice system, I had no idea how to engage the police or any other service. Although I spoke with the staff I feared by getting involved I would actually make matters worse. I have no idea what happened to her or her small child. I’ve had to live with this ever since.

‘I could not help her, but I could try to help others. So one way or another I have been committed to doing my bit over the past 18 years.’

The local Bank of South Pacific has donated a building that has become a safe house for victims, and another company, Steamships Trading, has donated an office now being used as a case-management centre. Security company G4S has agreed to send teams, free of charge, to collect victims and transport them to the safe house. Another company is providing cleaning supplies and furniture, and PNG Power is giving free electricity.

The Australian government has provided $4.5 million to support the initiative and the Harold Mitchell Foundation and Newcrest Mines have made donations.

Says Copus-Campbell: ‘I have confronted domestic violence in Alaska, where I grew up, Australia, my home, and PNG, a country I love. I am inspired by the fact so many Papua New Guineans are leading change and I’ve found ways to help them through the private sector.’

Campbell says addressing domestic violence is a shared interest for him and his wife.

‘We both also have a long-term association with PNG. I lived there as a child. Our own children spent their early childhood in Port ­Moresby and I have many longstanding professional relationships with Papua New Guinean military leaders whom I respect.’

The aftermath of a more recent dark event indicates that, albeit slowly, things are changing. A woman working with Copus-Campbell came to her workplace after a vicious assault. ‘She was completely traumatised. But she felt work was a safe space to seek help. I knew exactly how I could help her because Oil Search has just launched a policy that sets out how much leave I could offer, counselling I could pay for and transport I could give her to and from work.

‘I was then able to refer her to the Bel isi PNG case management centre. She sent me a note saying the perpetrator had been apprehended and they were moving to the next steps of prosecution. She told me she could not have gotten that far without the support from work.

‘I recalled again that small steps can lead to nationwide change and that nothing is too hard for a community of people working together.’

Port Moresby-based Serena Sasingian says the efforts of Copus-Campbell and her husband are enormously important to local people because they demonstrate that PNG is not alone in its quest to address gender equality and violence against women.

‘They’re a force for change not only in their own country but in PNG as well,’ Sasingian says.