Drew Caveney-Holler of our School of Government and International Affairs examines what the UK government can learn from Sweden's approach to defending against disinformation.
In his speech at the UN General Assembly in September, Andy Burnham announced that his security chiefs would begin work on a new National Centre for Information Defence.
The UK prime minister said the centre was necessary because of Russian attempts to “spread lies and disinformation”. He added: “Faced with this information warfare, security starts in every home.”
Burnham said the institution will “detect, attribute and disrupt” foreign information attacks. Beyond this, there is little information about what it will look like. But if security does indeed start at home, then preparing the public belongs at the heart of the centre.
Sweden has a dedicated agency for exactly this purpose. Its “psychological defence” approach sees an informed public as one of the country’s most important protections against foreign manipulation.
This idea dates to 1954, when the Swedish government set up a board for psychological defence to study propaganda and keep people informed during the cold war. Its spirit survives in a line from Sweden’s household crisis booklet, carried over from wartime editions: “All information to the effect that resistance is to cease is false.”
The board was abolished in 2008, but Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 began to change minds. And in January 2022, weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Sweden opened its new psychological defence agency.
The agency is small, with about 80 staff and a budget of around 150 million Swedish Krona (£11.3 million), and operates under the jurisdiction of Sweden’s defence ministry. In wartime, its job is to stop an enemy breaking down the nation’s will to resist.
In peacetime, its director, Magnus Hjort, says the agency’s main aim is strengthening public preparedness. The agency proclaims that strong psychological defence rests on an independent media, a mutually trusting society and a well-informed population.
The agency runs an awareness campaign called “Don’t Be Fooled”, which boils effective resistance down to four habits: watch out for content designed to make you angry or afraid, think twice before sharing it, check the source and look for verifiable information.
Its handbook gives practical advice on how to spot sketchy websites and identify bots, and the agency runs regular ads on public transport and social media.
The psychological defence agency tailors its work to groups it considers more vulnerable. It works with civil society on a Youth Resilience Hub to prepare young people for information attacks, makes educational films for older people about election interference and ensures its awareness campaigns run in Swedish, English and Arabic.
The agency also trains councils and businesses, and offered courses to municipal and regional officials ahead of Sweden’s September 2026 elections. And it provides free training to journalists on how to spot influence operations.
Psychological defence prioritises reaching every person and teaches that, in information warfare, the citizen is the target. This message reaches every letterbox. In November 2024, Sweden posted 5.2 million copies of the agency’s latest national crisis booklet, which warns that disinformation campaigns aimed at sowing mistrust happen every day.
The agency began to show its value within two months of opening. In early 2022, an Egypt-based news outlet falsely claimed that Swedish social services were kidnapping Muslim children. The claims spread and set off several protests across Sweden.
In response, the psychological defence agency went public about the campaign and the weaknesses it was exploiting. According to the agency’s deputy head, Mikael Tofvesson, media outlets then investigated the claim and many protest organisers distanced themselves from it.
More recently, staff at Sweden’s central bank spotted suspicious accounts on X after taking part in an agency-led exercise. They turned out to belong to Holiday, an AI-powered network of around 1,200 fake accounts that produced more than 50,000 posts designed to worsen polarisation on subjects like immigration. The network was removed from X and the agency published its findings to help the public recognise these tactics.
Research suggests the Swedish method works. Teaching people manipulation tricks before they meet them – known as “prebunking” – has seen promising testing at scale. In one large study on US residents from 2022, researchers found that short videos explaining common information manipulation techniques improved viewers’ ability to recognise them in other content.
Preparation for information manipulation is hard to measure, but Swedes appear alert to the threat. In the psychological defence agency’s 2025 citizen survey, 58% saw foreign information manipulation as a concrete threat – the highest share of any threat in the survey. Nevertheless, trust in society’s ability to withstand threats remained high.
The UK’s new centre already faces charges Sweden has had to answer. Within days of Burnham’s announcement, Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage labelled it an Orwellian “ministry of information”. He warned it “will be used to clamp down on free speech”.
Sweden’s psychological defence agency safeguards against concerns about censorship by only dealing with foreign influence. It treats citizens who repeat falsehoods as people to help, proclaiming that in a free society people have the right to be wrong.
In his UN speech, Burnham named those most at risk of foreign information manipulation: young people not in work and people struggling with the cost of living. Yet the UK’s official preparedness website says nothing about disinformation, and no part of government currently has clear responsibility for preparing the public.
Sweden gave that job to a dedicated agency, and the new National Centre for Information Defence is the obvious UK candidate. Its remit is still being settled, meaning there is still time to build preparedness into its mandate.
Detecting and disrupting information attacks will always matter, and Sweden’s experience suggests that the strongest defence is a public that recognises an attack when it sees one.
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