Countering State-Sponsored Disinformation and Ensuring Trustworthy Information Spaces

Our winter 2026 Buffett Symposium on disinformation convened global experts and practitioners from industry, public policy, academia, and civil society to address four urgent priorities: sustaining trust and credibility in information flows; strengthening accountability for platforms, governments, and users alike; advancing innovative tools and strategies to counter disinformation; and forging multi-sector collaboration to build resilient information ecosystems worldwide.

This panel brought together leaders of populations targeted by state-sponsored disinformation and U.S. foreign policy to discuss approaches to countering such campaigns and to ensure trustworthy information spaces.

Panelists included:

• Ellen McCarthy, Chairwoman and CEO, Trust in Media Cooperative; former US Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence & Research

• Shih-Hung Lo, Professor, National Chung Cheng University; Chairperson, Taiwan FactCheck Center

• Viktoriia Romaniuk, Deputy Chief Editor, StopFake; Director, Mohyla School of Journalism at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy

• Moderated by Olga Kamenchuk, Associate Professor of Instruction and Faculty Affiliate, Center for Communication & Public Policy, School of Communication

Key Takeaways:

Here's the trimmed version:

Key Takeaways:

• The most dangerous consequence of state-sponsored disinformation is not that people believe false things — it is that they stop trusting anything at all. Romaniuk described how Russia's decade-long information campaign against Ukraine has pursued a deliberate strategy of blurring the line between true and false, creating a climate in which people simply disengage from verification altogether. Lo echoed this from Taiwan's perspective, noting that Chinese influence campaigns during the 2024 presidential election were not designed to support any particular candidate but to convince citizens that democracy itself was broken and institutions could not be trusted. McCarthy reframed the threat in systemic terms: the strategic goal of adversaries is not persuasion but paralysis — polluting the information environment so that societies, governments, and alliances cannot think, coordinate, or act coherently.

• Russia and China pursue disinformation with meaningfully different strategies, and effective responses must account for those differences. McCarthy characterized Russia's approach as focused on mass disruption and chaos, while China's is more targeted, long-term, and data-driven — what Lo described as cognitive warfare. Lo explained how Chinese-linked actors have built networks of lifestyle social media accounts that post about food and travel to gain trust before pivoting to political content at critical moments. Against chaos-based disinformation, the right response is clarity and rapid correction; against precision-based cognitive warfare, the response must be long-term resilience built through media literacy, trusted local voices, and early detection of coordinated inauthentic behavior.

• Building resilient information ecosystems requires investing in trust infrastructure long before a crisis hits — and Ukraine and Taiwan offer hard-won models. Romaniuk described how StopFake spent years building a database of Russian disinformation narratives and cultivating a trusted public audience, so that when the full-scale invasion began, ordinary Ukrainians knew where to turn. Lo described Taiwan's civic technology community, where volunteer networks and professional fact-checkers use AI-assisted monitoring with final human verification, and where independent fact-checking has become authoritative enough that political parties now cite it to challenge each other. McCarthy argued that the broader lesson is the need to treat the information ecosystem as critical infrastructure — developing shared standards, provenance systems, and governance frameworks that function even when governments and platforms retreat from their traditional roles.