Limits on Information Operations Under International Law

Information or influence operations have been part and parcel of domestic and international life for centuries, having been used for a range of private and public purposes – from commercial advertisement to political propaganda. Yet, given their unprecedented scale and speed, digital information operations carried out by states and non-state actors have given rise to new international legal challenges. Notably, they have played an increasingly significant role in several offline harms – from health misinformation and disinformation hampering the fight against COVID-19 to online hate paving the way for acts of violence around the world. This calls into question the orthodox view that information operations do not violate international law. The purpose of this paper is to assess the extent to which existing international law – including general rules and principles and those specific to broadcasting and telecommunications – limits the digital deployment of information operations by states and non-state actors. It does so by first addressing the vexing yet overlooked question of factual and legal causation between those operations and some of the harmful consequences attributed to them. The paper then turns to how key international rules and principles, such as the principle of non-intervention, obligations of due diligence, and international human rights law, apply together to four key categories of information operations: propaganda, misinformation and disinformation, malinformation, and online hate speech.