Statement by Ed Thicknesse, UK Deputy Spokesperson, at the UN Fourth Committee on Information Integrity
The United Kingdom thanks the Department of Global Communications, under the leadership of Under-Secretary-General Fleming, for its impactful work, including on Information Integrity.
As UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham warned at the General Assembly, we face an “industrial-scale assault by hostile actors” on our information environment, one that corrodes trust, fuels conflict and puts lives at risk.
And we know that artificial intelligence will multiply the threat of misinformation and disinformation: spreading it faster, targeting it more precisely and making false content harder to detect.
In humanitarian crises, harmful information can undermine access to aid, shatter trust, fracture social cohesion and put staff in danger according to the IFRC’s World Disasters Report for 2026.