Indo-Pacific nations strengthen defenses against malign information

Felix Kim

Malign information campaigns by foreign actors are emerging as one of the Indo-Pacific’s most pressing security challenges. Intelligence agencies, defense ministries and multilateral coalitions across the region are countering such information warfare with increased urgency.

Authoritarian regimes are “actively weaponizing our open information environments to paralyze decision-making, split our societies and make nothing true,” Dr. Stephen Nagy, a professor at Tokyo’s International Christian University and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Canada, told FORUM.

The tactics are more sophisticated than the propaganda of past decades. Rather than pushing a particular narrative, adversaries now seek to exploit social fractures, often with the aim of casting doubt about institutions.

“It is gray zone coercion at its most insidious, designed to win geopolitical battles without ever firing a kinetic shot,” Nagy said.

Recent years have witnessed major malign information campaigns.

After a Chinese fighter jet conducted dangerous maneuvers near a Royal Australian Air Force surveillance aircraft on routine patrol over the South China Sea in October 2025, Beijing launched a multiday campaign using state-run media, inauthentic online accounts and artificial intelligence (AI)-generated pseudo-news sites to portray Australia as the aggressor. The digital onslaught demonstrated how information operations have become a routine extension of state-backed coercion.

Ahead of Taiwan’s January 2024 presidential election, foreign state-aligned actors flooded local platforms with more than 15,000 pieces of disinformation a day, including AI-generated deepfakes. China, which claims Taiwan as its territory and threatens to annex the self-governed island by force, was the main culprit, researchers found.

Autocratic states led by China and Russia deliberately blur the lines between peace and wartime contingencies through gray zone digital operations, according to the United States-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. Meanwhile, generative AI has dramatically multiplied the speed and reach of cross-border malign information campaigns, reported the Rand Corp., a U.S.-based think tank.

In response, regional Allies and Partners are introducing counter-disinformation frameworks into collective defense initiatives. NATO’s Indo-Pacific Four partners — Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea — have unified efforts against hybrid threats, while Southeast Asian nations including Indonesia and Singapore are drafting and enforcing legislation targeting malign information and foreign propaganda.

Japan’s 2022 National Security Strategy formally recognized cognitive warfare and mandated new counter-disinformation capabilities.

Nagy noted Taiwan’s whole-of-society model, which integrates civic organizations and government agencies, as a template for other democracies, alongside the Philippines’ strategy of publicly exposing coercive maritime actions to rally international support.

“Resilience demands an ecosystem of journalists, tech platforms and an informed public working in tandem,” he said.

International cooperation also is indispensable, Nagy said, highlighting minilateral frameworks such as the Quad partnership, which includes Australia, India, Japan and the U.S., and the Japan-South Korea-U.S. grouping as vehicles for intelligence sharing and coordinated attribution.

“No single nation can tackle this in isolation because the digital domain respects no borders,” he said.

Felix Kim is a FORUM contributor reporting from Seoul, South Korea.