The 'International Convention of German Russians' protest against sexual assaults by migrants in Berlin. The sign reads "We live in a country where monsters are free". The girl whose claims sparked this protest later admitted fabricating her story of rape by Middle Eastern-looking men. Credit:Reuters Information war and propaganda in various forms has been around for centuries. But the way it's being used in the internet age is new. The torrent of conflicting stories can lead to problems for the functioning of a democracy. That's because information war tactics have "a corrosive power on a population's ability to discern false information from true information and to discern what might be morally wrong form morally right", says Professor Greg Austin at the UNSW Australian Centre for Cyber Security. The effect "leads to a degeneration and delegitimisation of politics", he says. It's something to consider as countries like Russia and China, drawing on their Cold War experience, invest considerable resources to shape public opinion at home and abroad. Australian news consumers already find themselves in the flow of English-language misinformation and disinformation aimed at countries elsewhere.

Australia's media: Can it resist an effort to manipulate the news? Credit:Dominic Lorrimer The tools for this effort are diverse: everything from Twitter bots to pump up the popularity of news, to trolls based everywhere, to slickly produced conspiracy theories blended with real analysis. Social media has, in effect, created both an alternative to the news and a back door to the mainstream media. In this climate, Professor Austin warns the Australian public's inability to determine the real from false "will in due course magnify apathy and lead to resignation". Before "mass resignation seems to be mass hysteria based on lies", he says. Grassroots or astroturfing?: The 'International Convention of German Russians' protest in Berlin under a sign that reads "protect women". Credit:Reuters He gives the examples from abroad of the misinformation surrounding the campaign for Britain to leave the EU, and for Donald Trump's presidential run. Both have been marked by extensive misinformation – some of it inspired by or even contributed by foreign-backed outside groups – to shift voters' thinking. It's something US intelligence agencies are now investigating.

Analysts worry that the same thing could happen here. The ground would be fertile in Australia, which like other advanced economies faces inequality, slow economic growth, fears of immigration and a disappointment with politics as usual – all issues that can be exploited to cause division. It can happen here: Russian media gives lots of coverage to anti-immigrant groups in Europe, while Moscow builds links to the political parties. Credit:Getty Images "I think the Russians have picked up that across the West there is a widespread apathy amongst voters and mistrust of politics and government," said Matthew Sussex of ANU's National Security College, who studies Russian foreign and security policy. "Anything you can do to increase that distrust serves Russian interests." For example, in Europe, anti-immigrant far-right parties chip away at the consensus that holds the European Union together. Accordingly, these parties, and the migrant crisis issue which agitates them, receive top billing on Russia-owned media broadcasting in those European languages. Over time, a more divided Europe allows Russia to push for its goals on the international stage . Gone are the days of only a few media outlets controlling the news agenda. Presenter James Dibble on ABC TV.

"Russia and China understand that in order to win a global information war, they must get their message across to global audiences," says Russian strategic and defence affairs expert Alexey Muraviev. That realisation followed the Russia-Georgia war in 2008, when Moscow prevailed in the conflict but felt it lost the global war for opinion, says Dr Muraviev. In 2014, Russia moved away from an ad hoc approach to information war, consisting of separate parts, and formed a consolidated strategy, he added. Propaganda has come a long way since the Cold War - yet its internal logic remains the same. Scene from a 1956 film production of George Orwell's 1984. Credit:http://cosmiccatacombs.blogspot.com.au/ China too has invested heavily in strategic communications aimed at projecting its views on matters such as the South China Sea and Tibet abroad. This comes in addition to the now notorious influence efforts with the nation's politicians. Unleashing an active disinformation or misinformation campaign in Australia would be inexpensive and require little effort. Online, every country is only a single hyperlink away from the next. The misinformation, trolling and propaganda doesn't even have to come from abroad.

Estonia has been plagued by propaganda and cyberattacks. "The power of social media in Australia is really important," says Dr Muraviev, who heads the Department of Social Sciences and Security Studies at Curtin University. "There is a loyal audience here that would be following Russian news and that would be critical of Australia's government approach toward Russia." Members of the Serbian, Syrian and Russian expatriate community might actually take the Russian side on issues online and weigh in against the positions of the Australian government in our own media, he said. The media has certain dynamics which can be subverted. Credit:Michael Fitzjames "They don't necessarily believe in Russia," Dr Muraviev says, "but their support of the Russian position online can create a sense of disbelief in what the Australian government says about Russia."

And creating doubts about legitimate leaders and institutions is a hallmark of Russia's efforts in places like Ukraine, Estonia and Finland but also Germany and the United States. US ambassador to Australia John Berry acknowledged the trend in a speech at the end of August. Former Russia Today host Abby Martin famously condemned the Russian military action in Ukraine in 2014 on the Russia-owned network. Such controversies form part of the new propaganda war. Credit:CNN "Somehow in the United States at least we're finding increasingly [that countries such as Russia, North Korea and Iran, are] getting involved in our democracy, while they do not share that core value," he told an audience in Canberra. Once it becomes difficult for voters to understand what is going on in their own country, the political risks rise. Online propaganda wins attention in a crowded information sphere. Unlikely as it may seem, this picture of Eton schoolboys in the Kremlin helps confer legitimacy on the Russian government. Credit:Sputnik/Twitter

And it's not simply false stories or skewed stories with false presumptions being fed into the global or local news stream. In much the same way people can be radicalised online, the internet allows foreign organisations to reach and even coordinate events with domestic extremists, separatists, secessionists, violent racists and other radicals. Foreign powers can then create an echo chamber for the groups, amplifying the voice of domestic extremists. Information war can rely on hacked data in novel and damaging ways, too. Professor Austin sees the risk of "internet terror" or using leaked information posted online to terrorise politicians. In the US presidential election, emails of the Democratic Party were hacked and then later distributed via WikiLeaks to online trolls and pro-Trump social media sites – echoing messages that cast Hillary Clinton in the worst possible light. Despite all of this subversive activity, democracies' defences against information war are weak. Liberal democracies aren't in the business of telling their citizens what to think. Digital disruption has made the media less able to debunk specious stories and much more likely to pass along misinformation and information produced to undermine Western institutions. Besides, the traditional media can be bypassed.

"The West has a problem because the West doesn't do information war on a grand scale because it hasn't needed to," Professor Sussex says. The internet, worldwide web and social media, especially, blossomed in the post-Cold War era, when few anticipated the technology being exploited for this purpose. Professor Sussex says part of the problem is that Western nations work under the assumption that the internet is "governed by peacetime norms" but in places like Russia and possibly China, "the internet is the place of no norms". The Russian embassy dismissed talk about propaganda in Australia as another example of an effort to undermine Russia itself. "The concept of the omnipresent 'Russian propaganda' existing in Australian media is not surprising in the light of the tendency dominating in the West to portray our country as an embodiment of the 'global evil'," the embassy said in a statement.

"What is actually happening nowadays is not Russian information war, but information war against Russia," he said. "It is absolutely obvious to any unbiased professional." With foreign powers using the openness of the internet as a tool to destabilise or discredit Western governments, the relationship between the internet and liberal democracies is fundamentally changed. Professor Austin says the more frequent such tainted uses of information become, the more likely over time that voters give up trying to understand the news and events shaping their world. "To reverse the trend toward mass resignation [of voters] in the long term, we need to open up a contest for information power like we have not seen before," he says. "We need to have a mechanism for promoting integrity and standards," he adds. The government, private sector and civil society "need to combat abuse of the media to promote hate or simply to spread lies. In Australia, the major parties don't seem to understand this.

"They are losing the battle to escalating hysteria," he said. Elsewhere, debate has turned to what to do next to fight back in a globalised information war. The BBC has mulled a satellite news service in Russian. The EU has a small, full-time misinformation debunking outlet. The US is funding researching into blocking internet trolls. Professor Sussex goes further, saying he believes Australia will eventually have to "re-nationalise" its internet, not only taking a more activist approach to warding off cyberthreats from abroad but promoting its own ideas and values in its own backyard. And that would represent a sea change to the internet as we know it. Dr Muraviev, who advises Canberra on security issues, warns that "an oversimplified approach to addressing Russia propaganda can be counterproductive". The glut of Western reporting on Russia that focuses on President Vladimir Putin signals to Russian people who "feel they are under attack" that if the "West doesn't like Putin, he must be doing something right".