Infodemics and Information Disorder: Societal Vulnerabilities of the Body Politic - and Some Difficult Remedies

Based on evidence sent into the British Parliament about responses to the informational dilemmas of Covid 19, this talk looks at the numerous ways in which public misinformation, malinformation and disinformation can complicate and magnify strategic risks such as biosecurity events. It examines actual and proposed remedies to mitigate these problems and the technical, ethical and political dilemmas which will surround their implementation.

Paul Schulte is a retired senior UK career civil servant. After various other academic and think tank affiliations, he is now Honorary Professor at Birmingham University and a Senior Visiting Research fFellow at King's College London. He writes and lectures on drones, AI, terrorism, nuclear strategy and disarmament, and military ethics. After a social science degree at LSE, he worked on NI Security Policy and Human Rights in Northern Ireland, Middle Eastern defence commitments, tri-service military medical policy (reorganization, PTSD and Gulf War syndrome), and Nuclear, Biological, Chemical, and Conventional Arms Control. He was MODUK director of Proliferation and Arms Control, Britain's UN Commissioner for Iraqi Disarmament, Director of Defence Organization in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, founding Head of the UK Stabilization Unit, and Chief MoDUK Speechwriter. He has been a Weatherhead Fellow at Harvard and a practicing group psychotherapist.