The human brain is critical infrastructure — and it has no firewall

France has just adop­ted its first Nation­al Strategy to Com­bat Inform­a­tion Manip­u­la­tion. One com­pon­ent is the view that “the first line of defence against inform­a­tion manip­u­la­tion is soci­ety itself¹. The inten­tion is strong. But of the document’s fif­teen stra­tegic object­ives, only four relate to cit­izen resi­li­ence. The oth­er elev­en are divided between plat­form reg­u­la­tion, strength­en­ing state detec­tion cap­ab­il­it­ies and inter­na­tion­al action. Even more sig­ni­fic­antly: the scope is lim­ited to manip­u­la­tion of for­eign ori­gin, exclud­ing domest­ic dis­in­form­a­tion and algorithmic polar­isa­tion. This imbal­ance is no acci­dent. It is a symp­tom of a paradigm which, des­pite adjust­ments, remains focused on con­trolling the source of information.

Yet this paradigm faces a threefold impossib­il­ity. Firstly, a leg­al lim­it: the Bron­ner Com­mis­sion (2022), set up by the Pres­id­ent of the Repub­lic to assess and under­stand the threats posed by digit­al tech­no­logy to nation­al cohe­sion and our demo­cracy to bet­ter address them, itself acknow­ledged that seek­ing to act against dis­in­form­a­tion car­ries the risk of infringing on free­dom of expres­sion². Secondly, a tech­nic­al one: in a glob­al­ised digit­al space, no sys­tem can fil­ter all inform­a­tion flows at source. And finally, the psy­cho­lo­gic­al aspect: even when a cor­rec­tion reaches the indi­vidu­al, the ini­tial belief remains hard to dis­lodge. This is what the lit­er­at­ure refers to as the ‘per­sist­ent influ­ence effect’, extens­ively doc­u­mented by Eck­er et al. in Nature Reviews Psy­cho­logy³. False inform­a­tion leaves a cog­nit­ive imprint that cor­rec­tion can­not erase.

The tool has its tac­tic­al mer­its, but its under­ly­ing logic is that of counter-nar­rat­ive, which leaves the public’s cog­nit­ive vul­ner­ab­il­ity unaddressed

The French Response ini­ti­at­ive, launched in Septem­ber 2025 by the Min­istry for Europe and For­eign Affairs on the X plat­form, illus­trates this logic taken to its con­clu­sion. Its aim, accord­ing to Min­is­ter Jean-Noël Bar­rot, is to “restore the facts and cor­rect per­cep­tions” by enga­ging the inform­a­tion land­scape with rap­id counter-nar­rat­ives⁴. The tool has its tac­tic­al mer­its, par­tic­u­larly in the battle for pub­lic per­cep­tion in Africa. But its logic is that of counter-nar­rat­ive, which leaves the population’s cog­nit­ive vul­ner­ab­il­ity intact.

Is there a sci­en­tific­ally groun­ded altern­at­ive? Research in cog­nit­ive psy­cho­logy sug­gests there is, and that this altern­at­ive is based on a shift in per­spect­ive: tar­get­ing the receiv­er rather than the sender, strength­en­ing judge­ment rather than attempt­ing to con­trol the flow.

The work on psy­cho­lo­gic­al inocu­la­tion con­duc­ted at Cam­bridge by Sander van der Linden and Jon Roozen­beek provides the most robust empir­ic­al val­id­a­tion of this approach. By pre-expos­ing indi­vidu­als to diluted doses of manip­u­lat­ive tech­niques (appeals to emo­tion, false dilem­mas, reli­ance on fake experts), their abil­ity to identi­fy these tech­niques when they encounter them later is strengthened. The res­ults, con­firmed by a meta-ana­lys­is of 33 stud­ies and over 37,000 par­ti­cipants⁵, show that inocu­la­tion improves the abil­ity to dis­tin­guish between reli­able and unre­li­able con­tent without indu­cing response bias. This point is cru­cial: dis­cern­ment is strengthened without fos­ter­ing gen­er­al­ised mistrust.

NATO has drawn con­clu­sions from these advances. In Octo­ber 2025, the Applied Cog­nit­ive Effects team at Allied Com­mand Trans­form­a­tion for­mu­lated a concept it calls ‘resi­li­ence ori­ent­a­tion’: resi­li­ence at the stage of inter­pret­ing inform­a­tion. Its recom­mend­a­tion is unam­bigu­ous: the Alli­ance must move bey­ond the super­fi­cial fight against dis­in­form­a­tion to build cog­nit­ive resi­li­ence at every level, from indi­vidu­al train­ing to civil-mil­it­ary engage­ment⁶. This concept builds on the reflec­tions on cog­nit­ive war­fare ini­ti­ated by Bern­ard Clav­er­ie and Didi­er Baza­l­gette & Paul Janin­in these columns⁷, shift­ing the focus from the threat to the pro­tec­tion of the recipient.

Sweden offers the most suc­cess­ful proof of concept for this paradigm. Its Psy­cho­lo­gic­al Defence Agency (re-estab­lished in 2022) is based on a premise that can be summed up in a single sen­tence: “The harder it is to deceive you, the stronger our demo­crat­ic soci­ety is.” His­tor­i­an Hed­vig Ördén sum­mar­ises Sweden’s intel­lec­tu­al tra­ject­ory as a shift “from the pre­sumed adversary to the exposed pub­lic”⁸. The oper­a­tion­al­isa­tion is extens­ive: the nation­al “Bli inte lurad” cam­paign, a free train­ing scheme that reached over 10,000 par­ti­cipants in 2024, and a pro­gramme to involve young people from outly­ing neigh­bour­hoods in dis­cus­sions on resilience.

In France, media and inform­a­tion lit­er­acy (MIL) and the work of the Nation­al Edu­ca­tion Sci­entif­ic Coun­cil on crit­ic­al think­ing⁹ are a step in the right dir­ec­tion. How­ever, EMI remains a cross-cur­ricular sub­ject, and the Gen­er­al Inspect­or­ate of Edu­ca­tion, Sport and Research (IGÉSR) has high­lighted its weak­nesses in primary edu­ca­tion and region­al inequal­it­ies¹⁰. Above all, these ini­ti­at­ives do not reach adults. The ASTRID ‘Res­ist­ance’ call for pro­jects (AID/ANR, July 2025), which funds research into cog­nit­ive res­ist­ance, is an encour­aging sign but remains an applied research pro­gramme, not a scheme that is imme­di­ately oper­a­tion­al on a pop­u­la­tion-wide scale.

What is miss­ing is an over­arch­ing concept. Epi­stem­ic autonomy, as renewed by the work of Math­eson and Lougheed (Rout­ledge, 2022) or the Oxford-Glas­gow ‘Expand­ing Autonomy’ pro­ject¹¹, provides the philo­soph­ic­al found­a­tion. Psy­cho­lo­gic­al inocu­la­tion provides the meth­od. Swedish psy­cho­lo­gic­al defence provides the insti­tu­tion­al mod­el. But the link between indi­vidu­al cog­nit­ive pro­tec­tion and col­lect­ive resi­li­ence remains to be established.

It is this link that I pro­pose to call cog­nit­ive sov­er­eignty: the train­able and trans­fer­able capa­city to pro­tect one’s judge­ment against attempts at manip­u­la­tion. I laid the found­a­tions for this in a recent book, A Short Treat­ise on Cog­nit­ive Sov­er­eignty¹² [le Petit Traité de Souveraineté Cog­nit­ive, in French], by pro­pos­ing con­crete tools (the STOP pro­tocol, map­ping of inter­pret­at­ive biases, the ter­rit­ori­al meta­phor of men­tal space) so that every cit­izen can become an agent of their own inform­a­tion­al defence. For if human beings are the ulti­mate tar­get of any influ­ence oper­a­tion, the solu­tion can only be fun­da­ment­ally human.