Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what assessment his Department has made of the (a) content and (b) level of disinformation spread by (a) the Russian state,(b) agents of the Russian state, (c) Russian, non-state actors in the UK.

The UK is at the forefront of a growing international consensus on the need to take action against disinformation, regardless of source or intent. The Government continues to monitor the nature and level of the threat posed by Russian state-sponsored disinformation. As the Prime Minister said in her Mansion House speech in November 2017, Russia is seeking to weaponise information, deploying its state-run media organisations to plant fake stories and photo-shopped images in an attempt to sow discord in the West and undermine our institutions. Following the Salisbury attack in March 2018, the Russian state and Russian state media pushed out a deluge of disinformation with over 40 different narratives to confuse audiences and distract from Russian culpability.