Amid the evolving landscape of Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI), strategic communication plays a crucial role in sustaining public trust and defending democratic values.
As part of ADAC.io’s ongoing efforts to explore innovative responses to FIMI, we spoke with Professor Martin Innes, Director of the Security, Crime and Intelligence Innovation Institute at Cardiff University and an ADAC.io project partner.
In this conversation, Professor Innes shares his insights on attribution challenges, the hidden costs of over-attribution, the limitations of fear-based messaging, and the unexpected power of humor in public communication. From tactical disruptions to long-term cognitive effects, his perspective highlights the complexity of countering FIMI in today’s information environment.
What are the current challenges in attribution and measuring impact?
“We’ve got a real attribution challenge, and we’ve got a real effect measurement challenge. […] Attribution has gotten harder, there are restrictions on data, and adversaries have gotten sharper and better. […] And of course, there’s the whole outsourcing factor and the deliberate obfuscation of links.”
“One of the errors we sometimes make is applying our lenses, our values, and our concepts to what we think is going on. But actually, I think […] we need to be trying to put ourselves into the minds of the people designing the campaigns against us.”
“We’re trying to measure tactical effect. Our adversaries are thinking in terms of strategic effect. The doctrine of active measures is to identify the pain points—the weaknesses in your target—and work those. Exploit them. Manipulate them. It’s not about introducing something new. […] They’re not expecting a single operation to have a defined effect. What they’re interested in is the cumulative aggregation of these things over time.”
What are the most difficult FIMI tactics to detect or counter?
“One is the highly visible, highly noisy, very volume-based kind of ‘flood-the-zone’ tactics, which are becoming easily accessible through the operationalization of AI and LLM models. Each individual case may have minimal effect on its own, but it can aggregate into something significant because there’s just so much of it.”
“The second issue is the extent to which this might be a deliberate misdirection or distraction. It consumes so much bandwidth and effort that we’re not really able to look for the more insidious, manipulative kinds of things we ought to be worrying about.”
What gaps remain in detection and public communication?
“There are still things that we can attribute with high confidence […] but there’s a lot now where we’re left saying, ‘I don’t know. It could be.’”
“One of the pressures is the tendency to engage in what we’ve referred to as over-attribution. […] We spent more time trying to debunk claims that didn’t meet the evidential threshold than actually being able to investigate and follow the things that truly mattered.”
“We’ve got a particular gap in understanding how manipulated information moves between domestic and international domains. […] Most democratic governments want to draw a distinction between domestic counter-intelligence and international offensive problems. But information doesn’t work like that anymore.”
“We need to be able to say: this is the kind of content that causes harm and warrants a response versus the noise we’re just going to have to learn to live with.”
Why is public trust essential in countering FIMI?
“Trust is absolutely critical in terms of everything that we do in this space. One of the things we know about what our adversaries are trying to do when they run information operations is degrade and destroy trusted institutions. […] The broader issue is: how do we sustain sufficient levels of trust in our democratic institutions and in democracy as an institution so that the kinds of governance, the kinds of systems, and the kinds of lives and freedoms that we all enjoy can be preserved?”
“I’ve started thinking in terms of the interconnection between truth, trust and togetherness. […] It’s not just about taking information operations in isolation, but about connecting them to other parts of the democratic ecosystem.”
What role can humor play in public messaging?
“We ran this experiment with the Metropolitan Police in London. We prepared an alternative messaging campaign based around a cartoon cat dressed as a policeman. We called him Cop Cat. We tested the Metropolitan Police’s standard messaging alongside our cartoon cat. Both received the same degree of attention.
“What was different, though, was that when we surveyed people who were exposed to the Met Police’s standard crime prevention messaging campaign, we saw an uptick in their fear of crime because they were being told to be afraid. Fear-based messaging led to side effects—the negative side effects to avoid. We didn’t get that with the comedy cat campaign. Similar levels of awareness, similar levels of effect, but just without the negative side effects.”
“Some of the best countermeasures I’ve seen in strategic communications have been funny. It’s been quite interesting to see how some of the content that works against us is also funny. Some of the memes are quite creative, clever, and fun. And yet, we’re trying to counter that with very straight-laced factual messaging. It doesn’t achieve the same level of cut-through.”
Any final advice for those working in the FIMI space?
“Look back on the history. If you read some of the history of active measures and some of what the KGB was doing […] albeit it’s digitally enabled and albeit they are hacking information, they’re also hacking human brains and exploiting human emotions and cognitive patterns.”
Cardiff University joins ADAC.io through its Security, Crime, and Intelligence Innovation Institute, contributing research on how foreign information threats evolve—and how strategic communication can help build democratic resilience.