SUMMARY
- BBC Media Action is the BBC’s international charity, operating one of the largest global media-development networks in the world.
- BBC Media Action positions itself as a leader in efforts to counter “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “information disorder.”
- USAID provided £2.613 million to BBC Media Action in FY 2023–24, representing 8% of the charity’s total income.
- Other major funders include the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Google Jigsaw, the tech giant’s counter-extremism think-tank that was turned against Americans after the 2016 election.
- In its public reports, BBC Media Action promotes the idea of using the developing world as a testing ground for counter-disinformation techniques.
- Its techniques include “prebunking,” a psychological manipulation technique pioneered by Google Jigsaw.
BBC Media Action functions as the international influence arm of the BBC, Britain’s state-funded broadcaster. As one of the largest foreign media intervention organizations on the planet, it openly advertises a global footprint of more than 100 million people, operating across 30 countries and in 50 languages.
In 2023–24, U.S. taxpayers—via USAID—supplied roughly 8 percent of BBC Media Action’s total income. This funding arrived after the nonprofit made “countering disinformation” its top strategic priority, a euphemism that increasingly translates into support for censorship-aligned systems abroad under the banner of “information resilience.”
BBC Media Action’s other financial backers form a familiar constellation of state and corporate power.
Alongside the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office, major sponsors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Google’s Jigsaw division—the same unit behind Silicon Valley’s “psychological inoculation” initiatives, which research and deploy methods for shaping and steering public opinion in digital spaces.
Influencing Policy, Promoting Censorship
In a 2021 policy report titled Tackling Information Disorder, BBC Media Action framed modern elections as increasingly vulnerable to what it labels “mis-, dis-, and malinformation.” The organization singled out these dynamics as contributing factors behind two major democratic outcomes it evidently found troubling: Donald Trump’s 2016 victory in the United States and the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom.
The report goes further, describing an explicit strategy to shape political and regulatory environments worldwide. BBC Media Action highlights its work with a broad coalition of partners to “influence regulation of social media companies,” openly positioning itself as an actor seeking to guide government intervention in the digital information space.
This includes familiar components of the global censorship architecture: AI-driven detection programs, “information disorder” monitoring systems, and media-literacy campaigns embedded in school curricula.
Later in the document, the organization details efforts to train journalists and media outlets to “investigate and challenge public figures” who deviate from approved narratives on combating “information disorder.”
Further driving home the point. BBC Media Action also acknowledges its work “strengthening legal, regulatory, and economic environments” to exert control over the information ecosystem — a naked admission that the nonprofit, backed by USAID alongside the British government, works to influence governments to control the information environment.
In effect, BBC Media Action outlines a top-to-bottom model for reshaping public discourse—one that merges political pressure, technological surveillance, and newsroom conditioning under the banner of fighting online misinformation.
As to how BBC Media Action wants to see tech companies regulated, this too is stated plainly in the report: the problem, in the state-backed nonprofit’s view, lies in the core design of social media platforms:
In this, BBC Media Action was ahead of the curve — new pro-censorship organizations, like the Knight-Georgetown Institute, increasingly focus on low-profile, design-level censorship rather than highly visible and controversial bans on large accounts.
Information Disorder
The same 2021 report lays out BBC Media Action’s framework for confronting what it calls “information disorder”—a term not organically derived from research, but manufactured by First Draft, a nine-member “counter-disinformation” consortium. First Draft’s roster reads like a who’s-who of institutional gatekeepers: Google News Lab, Twitter, Facebook, the Open Society Foundations, Meedan (best known for its attempts to police private messaging channels like WhatsApp), and the NATO-aligned investigative collective Bellingcat.
Both Meedan and Bellingcat sit squarely inside the ecosystem of U.S. government-funded influence operations. Meedan has taken in $5.7 million from the National Science Foundation to pursue projects targeting “hate, abuse, and misinformation”—phrases that increasingly function as policy justifications for digital speech controls. Bellingcat, meanwhile, was incubated with support from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the U.S.-funded quasi-NGO that The New York Times once described as performing “in the open what the Central Intelligence Agency has done surreptitiously for decades.”
In its report, BBC Media Action adopts First Draft’s broad and malleable definition of “information disorder,” which encompasses not only falsehoods but also “malinformation”—true information deemed harmful when presented without the proper framing—as well as generic “hyperpartisan content.” In effect, the concept provides a capacious vocabulary for classifying disfavored speech as a societal threat.
The report’s definition:
A collective term to capture the range of disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, rumours, myths, conspiracy theories, hyperpartisan content, propaganda and manipulated media that contribute to the spread of false or misleading information.
The BBC’s nonprofit listed several harmful impacts of information disorder, including “distortion of understanding about climate change,” “vaccine hesitancy,” and “distortion of political debate.”
BBC Media Action notes that those responsible can include mainstream journalists, politicians, and religious leaders — meaning no-one is off-limits from the response. This is in line with recent calls to create criminal penalties against political candidates who spread disinformation.
The Developing World as Testing Ground
In an impact report delivered to the UK Parliament in March 2025, BBC Media Action described its strategy. It would use its global reach to conduct experiments in the digital manipulation of public opinion in the Third World, proving valuable data on which techniques prove the most effective:
This reaffirmed what had been stated by senior research manager for BBC Media Action in a January 2025 op-ed, who stated “Much of the research being done in this space focuses mainly on wealthy nations, and excludes low- and middle-income countries, a gap that BBC Media Action is working to fill.”
While no comprehensive list of the countries and regions targeted by BBC Media Action exists, the op-ed mentions activity in countries from “the Solomon Islands to Libya.” The op-ed also mentioned that the nonprofit is active in Ethiopia, Zambia, and the North African region broadly.
BBC Media Action’s report to Parliament lists more countries where it is active: Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Tonga, Vanuatu and Fiji, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and Armenia, Bangladesh, and Sierra Leone.
Thanks to $961,854 in funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, BBC Media Action is also active in Nigeria — specifically to counter narratives against the COVID-19 vaccine.
Familiar Techniques: Psychological Inoculation and Media Literacy
Through BBC Media Action’s publications, the nonprofit recommends two familiar counters to “information disorder” — “psychological inoculation” or “prebunking” measures aimed at influencing public opinion against disfavored narratives, and “media literacy training” in schools.
BBC Media Action published a guide to prebunking, which researchers describe as a means to “psychologically inoculate” the masses against disfavored narratives.
According to its reports, BBC Media Action is aggressively pursuing prebunking trials in regions from North Africa to Eastern Europe, collaborating with groups such as Cambridge University and Google’s Jigsaw to refine and scale the methodology.
As the Foundation for Freedom Online previously reported, the U.S. government backed the Google-Cambridge nexus of “prebunking research” via DHS:
The United States government (and other western nations) are directly tied to the development of this psychological weapon. [The Cambridge Social Decision-making Lab], which has focused overwhelmingly on developing prebunking techniques, is partnered with Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the now-notorious censorship subagency of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The lab is also partnered with the UK’s Cabinet Office (to combat “COVID misinformation”) and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, the country’s version of the State Department. American as well as British taxpayers are paying for the same psychological manipulation toolkit their governments hope to use against them.
This taxpayer-funded psychology research into opinion-shaping techniques is only one half of the picture. The censorship industry also requires mass distribution capacity, through major platforms, to spread these “psychological vaccines” to the widest possible audience. That’s where the Social Decision-Making Lab’s private sector partner, Google, comes into the frame – in particular, its “counter-extremism” unit, known as Jigsaw.
Google Jigsaw, formerly Google Ideas, is a psychological influence lab that was founded by a State Department regime change specialist who previously harnessed digital technologies to support the Arab Spring. Google Jigsaw originally sought to counter Islamic extremism, but later shifted its focus to target Trump supporters in the U.S.
Within days of Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016, behind closed doors, Google executives branded Trump voters “extremists” and discussed using Jigsaw’s redirect method against them. Even before Trump’s election, Moonshot CVE’s co-founder was openly discussing the “far-right” in the U.S. as a “phase two” target of the redirect method. By 2021, it was clear the redirect method was being used against Americans – after Google was exposed for “redirecting” American users believed to be far-right to the opposite end of the spectrum: a far-left anarchist.
Media Literacy also appears through BBC Media Action’s reports. In recommendations to the OECD, the nonprofit highlighted media literacy as a key area for future development, alongside prebunking techniques.
Promoting media literacy is also a key item in BBC Media Action’s global “Pursuit of Truth” program, launched at the Clinton Global Initiative in September 2024. The Pursuit of Truth program aims to invest $20m in efforts to combat mis- and dis-information over three years.
In its written evidence to the UK Parliament, BBC Media Action also identified media literacy as its top technique for countering disinformation, alongside its work with the University of Cambridge on prebunking.
Here, again, BBC Media Action’s priorities reflect that of the wider censorship industry, which has increasingly focused on promoting media and digital literacy training in classrooms, particularly through state-level legislation in the U.S. With curricula provided by well-known names in the censorship industry, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and NewsGuard, the goal is to teach American students to avoid the same non-establishment sources that have previously been targeted for censorship.
