Epistemic Security for Crisis Resilience: An Analysis of Information Threats, Vulnerabilities, and Priority Interventions

Demos's January 2026 report on epistemic security for crisis resilience is the most comprehensive analysis available of how information threats undermine democratic crisis response — covering deepfakes, synthetic media, and coordinated disinformation as threats not just to everyday information consumption but to the specific institutional and public communication processes on which effective crisis management depends. Co-authored with Henry Ajder, the leading expert on synthetic media, the report's threat taxonomy is technically grounded in a way that most policy documents are not.

The crisis resilience framing is analytically important and underweighted in the FIMI literature, which tends to focus on electoral and political contexts. When democracies face genuine crises — pandemics, natural disasters, terrorist attacks — the information environment is simultaneously most important (public understanding and compliance with authorities depends on it) and most vulnerable (adversaries exploit crisis conditions to amplify disinformation). The priority interventions proposed across government, platforms, and civil society provide a structured framework for building the crisis communication capacity that the August 2024 UK riots demonstrated is currently inadequate.