Hamish Macdonald

The disinformation is often far more deliberate, organized.

Sometimes it's state-backed.

So countries like Russia or China or even Western countries might be involved in disseminating disinformation.

Like one of the stories that we explore in this series is, do you remember during the Paris Olympics, there was like the big story about all the bedbugs?

Everyone was getting bedbugs at the Paris Olympics.

Yeah.

It was all a Russian disinformation campaign.

So they call these sort of gray zone tactics, hybrid warfare, sometimes the description it's given.

Often the specific objective is unclear.

But the broad objective is to destabilize, create so distrust.

So often, you know, Russia is probably the biggest, um, uh, state actor, uh, behind disinformation campaigns, or at least the most experienced at it.

And they'll do it to sow distrust in democratic society, make people question their government, the ability of their government to deliver on policy outcomes.

Yeah.

You would rightly ask, why would anyone bother coming up with a disinformation campaign about road rules in Australia?

Yeah.

But it makes us doubt our systems, our institutions, our relationship with government.

So that next time the government tells us something or tries to enforce something, we might be more likely to question it or say, oh, that's rubbish.

We went to the Poland-Belarus border as part of this where –

There's a huge border fence.

Russia and Belarus, so Belarus is like a client state of Russia, they're accused of advertising cheap flights and visas from Central Africa, Somalia, the Middle East, Syria, Afghanistan, to come to Russia and Belarus as a cheap and easy way to a new life in Europe.