Here’s the thing about disinformation that almost no one knows. And it's why the EU is powerless to solve it.

Disinformation is just digital marketing.

It's the same techniques that Nike uses to sell you sneakers, except it's selling ideas.

Russia and China are competing for space in our minds the same way as brands do.

They’ve figured out how to package their ideas in a way that works and so more and more people are switching “brand allegiance” from democracy to authoritarian, from balanced to paranoid.

And again, it’s just digital marketing. They do really smart psycho social research on their target societies and that underpins their messaging. They come up with a bunch of hypotheses and lots of creative assets and then they use an experimental methodology to find out what works. It’s about throwing lot’s of stuff at the wall, seeing what sticks and then doubling down on that.

They’re good at it. So it works.

But the really important thing about this insight - that disinfo is just digital marketing - is that, until we know how it works, we're powerless to stop it. We don't even know how to begin, or what success would look like.

So here’s the answer: success is about outperforming the disinfo in terms of traction. That’s measurable using big data. We can use the same smart psycho social techniques and the same experimental methodology and we can beat the disinfo in the marketplace of ideas.

Say that to anyone who really knows their stuff in digital marketing and they’ll see the logic pretty much straight away. But getting governments and iNGOs to work like this is an uphill struggle.