For more than a century, the United States and Australia have enjoyed a close relationship built around shared democratic values, common interests, and cultural affinities. Beginning in 1949, the two countries signed numerous agreements ranging from defense and mutual assistance to free trade and bilateral investment.
In early August, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong again expanded cooperation between the two countries by signing a Memorandum of Understanding on Countering Foreign State Information Manipulation.
The United States considers foreign information manipulation and interference to be a national security threat to the United States, as well as to its allies and partners. Authoritarian governments use information manipulation to manipulate social discourse, skew national and international debates on subjects of critical importance, and undermine democratic institutions. Clearly, the threat is trans-national, and so it requires a coordinated international response.
That is why earlier this year, the United States introduced the Framework to Counter Foreign State Information Manipulation, an important new tool for addressing this problem. The idea is to build a broad coalition of like-minded countries, each of which will bring its own, unique strengths, capacities, and resources. To begin with, they will share information on threats posed by foreign information manipulation; expand capacity for counter-disinformation programming; and align their government policies.
“This is basically a partnership to work together even more effectively on combating misinformation and disinformation,” said Secretary Blinken.
“We know that around the world, we are in an environment in which misinformation, disinformation is unfortunately a tool of choice for countries that are in adversarial relationships with both of our countries.”
“Australia is now the 20th country to sign an agreement with us,” said Secretary Blinken. “We have agreements with European partners, African partners, in East Asia, in other places, all of whom have endorsed this framework.”
“It allows us to work together to identify misinformation and disinformation, and then to take effective steps together to combat it – sharing best practices, sharing other tools that we’ve developed; building greater resilience in our civil society, our institutions; strengthening information integrity across the entire digital ecosystem,” he said.
“Through this [Memorandum of Understanding],” said Secretary Blinken, “the United States and Australia intend to expand information sharing and pursue complementary approaches to this threat across the Indo-Pacific.”
