Bangladesh needs to craft a new national strategy to meet the challenges of disinformation and influence operations, Bangladesh Institute of Peace and Security Studies (BIPSS) President Major General ANM Muniruzzaman (retired) said Wednesday.
"It has to be a dynamic process and is constantly updated. Bangladesh needs to assess the information space and its vulnerability objectively and comprehensively. Mere suppression of information sometimes is counterproductive and causes more damage," he added.
BIPSS hosted the roundtable "Disinformation and Influence Operations: A Threat to National Security" at a city hotel Wednesday. Muniruzzaman moderated the discussion.
Muniruzzaman said: "The state no longer enjoys a monopoly over information. There are multiple and numerous information actors in the information space where even a very young TikTok creator is playing a role of a powerful information actor, sometimes more powerful than the journalists."
"Influence operations are normally carried out against the state by foreign actors. This is done by a combination of information manipulation and information distortion. All states, big or small, weak or powerful, are vulnerable," he added.
"The example of Cambridge Analytica shows how a national election can be influenced and swung. Since states' behaviour and policies are increasingly information-based, they have also become information vulnerable. The national security of the state is today linked to information," Muniruzzaman said.
Shafqat Munir, a senior research fellow at BIPSS, said: "Information cannot be suppressed, nor can an information vacuum be created."
He recommended creating awareness across society as one of the biggest tools for fighting disinformation.
Ayesha Kabir, head of Prothom Alo's English web, said the media should not act as an activist. "It should act as a tool, to tell the truth. The media has a great role in portraying the truth and must be able to verify the information."
