“A report in the Economist describes how China seeks to influence Taiwan’s election, scheduled for next January. As an example it cites a story that reached United Daily News, one of Taiwan’s top newspapers, revealing leaked documents in which the US asked that biological weapons be manufactured at a lab run by the island’s defence ministry. Soon these documents were shown to be pretty crude Chinese fakes, but by then the story had spread to Taiwanese talk shows and influencers. Eventually the story was embellished further, turning it into a plot to collect 150,000 samples of Taiwanese blood to develop a special virus to kill ethnic Chinese.”

“For example, in Russia’s efforts to deny that the regime of Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against rebels in the Syrian civil war, and to discredit the ‘White Helmets’ group, what mattered more than the disinformation, unpleasant though that was, was Russia’s institutional advantages as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, which enabled it to undermine and even block international investigations.”

“Most importantly, while these campaigns can be aggravating, they feed off pre-existing divisions within our societies and diminished confidence in elites and systems of governance. If we were better able to address the sources of division within our societies, there would be fewer opportunities for others to exploit them. Countries such as China, Iran and Russia are opportunists. The best way to combat them, therefore, is to strengthen our own democratic practices.”