Labor frontbencher Tim Watts says rebuilding public trust in a free media, civil society and parliaments has become a critical national security imperative, because restoring institutional trust is the most effective antidote to ubiquitous disinformation.

Watts, who is shadow assistant minister for communications and cyber security, used a Lowy Institute lecture on Thursday night to declare that public trust in institutions “should be the comparative advantage of liberal democracy over authoritarian states in the new information environment”.

Watts said since the end of the cold war, an era in history where there was an overt clash of political systems, democracy had been taken for granted, and decades of complacency about the state of democracy had left critical institutions seriously weakened.

“The absence of a serious alternative to democracy has allowed us to take our democracy for granted,” the Labor frontbencher said. “We’ve neglected it.”

“Renewing our democracy is a challenge for everyone in our democracy, regardless of ideology.”

Watts said his generation of parliamentarians, the generation Y cohort, faced the same challenge that leaders such as John Curtin and Ronald Reagan faced in the past at critical junctures in history – “winning the hearts and minds of the public for the cause of democracy”.

He said the rise of the internet had radically reframed people’s experience. “We need ask ourselves how we want our democracy to work in the face of this technological change.”

“How do we think about the relationship between citizens, the state and internet platforms? How can we grow and maintain the shared space, the mutual regard and the common interests that we need for our democracy to function?”

Watts said cyber-enabled information operations and disinformation campaigns were increasingly common in western democracies. Sometimes the campaigns had a specific objective, like interference in elections, but “sometimes the objective is simply to inflame division, disrupting the ability of democratic systems to build consensus for action”.

“Regardless of their objective, the success or failure of these campaigns is dependent on the health of the democratic institutions of the target state.”

He said countering disinformation in democracies was difficult, but the task was even more fraught in authoritarian nations, where citizens were entirely aware they could not trust what their leaders and public authorities tell them.

Watts said because of the trust deficit, “cults, faith healers, pyramid schemes and conspiracy theories are mainstream national preoccupations in Russia, and extraordinarily, nearly six in 10 Russians believe the Apollo moon landings were a hoax”.

“In China, government authorities and the state media compete with a constantly churning rumour mill as state pronouncements are second guessed and members of the public seek to triangulate the truth from as many sources of information as possible, not matter how dubious.

What drives clicks and subscriptions among these tribes are culture wars, not public interest journalism Tim Watts

“What this underlines is that our ability to respond to disinformation relies on public trust. Technology won’t solve this for us.”

As well as the challenges of disinformation, Watts said the technological disruption caused by the internet had upended mainstream media, and that disruption had profound societal consequences.

“The internet hasn’t merely changed the medium people use to consume media, it’s radically changed the entire media ecosystem.”

Rather than being able to rely on revenue from advertising, “media outlets try to stay afloat via subscriptions and targeted advertising”.

“The editorial incentives of this model are different,” Watts said. “Instead of seeking to appeal to a broad base of readers, and classifieds bargain hunters, media outlets increasingly seek to serve political tribes.

“What drives clicks and subscriptions among these tribes are culture wars, not public interest journalism.”

He said social media platforms also herded people into tribes, allowing people “to build communities of interest around every imaginable niche”. But the technology didn’t promote dialogue between people with competing views, it promulgated networks of “people who share and reinforce our biases”.

Watts says the complexities of the current environment gave urgency to basic reforms with the objective of restoring trust and confidence in institutions, like a national integrity commission.

He said another obvious area to address was political donations and disclosure reform, including caps on campaign spending, and well as defending a free press and the right to protest.

He said while foreign hackers and disinformation on social media platforms posed significant challenges, the great challenge of the contemporary age was actually community cynicism.

“It’s the idea that we can’t expect any better of our democracy. And that’s a battle we must win with ourselves.”