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UK Parliament’s powerful Foreign Affairs Committee has called on the government to do much more to fight disinformation abroad, which has “the potential to seriously undermine our own democracy”.

In its report today following an inquiry lasting over a year, the committee said the information environment is being “weaponised by malign state actors such as Russia, China and Iran and non-state actors like Daesh to sow distrust, undermine cohesion, and erode confidence in democratic institutions and norms”.

Although it welcomes that the foreign secretary has made tackling this issue a priority, it was “dismayed” to learn that the Foreign Office’s ability to respond to disinformation is being “constrained by insufficient funding”, which must be increased.

The committee also criticised social media companies, saying MPs “remain dissatisfied with their actions to combat foreign interference and the lack of transparency around algorithmic systems”.

Dame Emily Thornberry, who chairs the committee, said in a statement that “open liberal democracies are sitting ducks” for malign actors seeking to weaponise disinformation.

“From pushing provable lies to planting false seeds of doubt, disinformation is the weapon of choice of hostile states seeking to destabilise democracies,” she continued.

“It seeps into societal cracks, seeking out our vulnerabilities to exploit them. It aims to undermine our sense of identity and cohesion, and even our ability to tell fact from fiction, in order to leave us divided and weakened.”

The committee’s report calls on the government to:

• Work much more closely with global allies, particularly in Europe, to tackle disinformation;
• Launch a public awareness campaign to educate the public about foreign disinformation and interference, including by declassifying examples;
• Create a statutory, public-facing National Counter Disinformation Centre;
• Use the defence spending increase to fund more staff in the Foreign Office’s Hybrid Threats Directorate;
• Take from the 5% defence uplift to increase funding and staffing within the Hybrid Threats Directorate;
• Defend media freedoms, and increase long-term funding for the BBC World Service with money from the defence budget;
• Require social media companies to make algorithms transparent to the public.

The Foreign Office welcomed the committee’s inquiry and will give a full response in due course, as is the usual process.

But it was noted that an additional £11m in annual funding for the BBC World Service was announced last week.

The department also pointed to a speech delivered by the foreign secretary in December, in which she said: “The term disinformation does not begin to capture the industrial scale approach from some malign actors today…

“That is why we have built world-class cyber security, expert law enforcement and intelligence capabilities.”