Democracy movements are getting younger. But youthful energy alone isn’t enough. Movements for freedom can be hijacked by malign influence or twisted into populist causes. The real challenge is keeping them liberal, disciplined, and resilient.

Take Georgia. With intensifying demonstrations from Presidential elections to local elections earlier this month. The ruling Georgian Dream party — aligned with Moscow — was accused of manipulating the process, prompting opposition parties to call for a boycott and mass protests in Tbilisi.

While the protests unfolded, the Atlantic Council (23 October 2024) published a report detailing Russia’s interference in Georgian society. The findings were alarming because the Kremlin’s methods closely mirror what happened in Hong Kong between 2014 and 2020.

Russia’s playbook begins with hijacking narratives through targeted misinformation. These campaigns are not just broad — they are personal. Democracy leaders are singled out with lies, threats, and psychological pressure. Moscow’s intelligence networks, including the SVR, push the familiar “foreign invasion” line — claiming that Western powers are orchestrating coups to topple so-called “legitimate” pro-Russian governments.

The Atlantic Council reported:

“In August 2024, Meta removed a Russia-originated network targeting Georgia that was actively posting about the protests against the Russian-style foreign agents law… Russian actors sought to blur the line between authentic political discourse and manipulated narratives, making it challenging for Georgians to differentiate between genuine public sentiment and foreign interference.”

Telegram channels — including one run by NewsFront, a Kremlin-linked disinformation outlet — have amplified false claims of a Western-backed coup.

We’ve seen this before. When Beijing sought to impose electoral changes in Hong Kong in 2014, students led the Umbrella Revolution, demanding the universal suffrage promised at the 1997 handover. Social media became a lifeline for coordination — Facebook and the city-built forum LIHKG helped organisers communicate and mobilise.

Almost immediately, the authorities launched a disinformation campaign to discredit and divide protesters. False reports circulated that police had been authorised to use live ammunition or that student factions were fighting among themselves. Then more fake narratives falsified students in uniform taking bribes when those pretenders did not even wear the correct school badges. Lastly, the authorities tried pitting the youth against the old by building narratives of economic losses to the equities and property markets. These weren’t random rumours — they were calculated attempts to erode trust inside a decentralised movement.

Similarly, fake polling results and planted “leaders” deepened the confusion. The movement eventually lost momentum, but Hong Kongers learned how state-sponsored misinformation works.

By 2019, during the Anti-Extradition Protests, activists had become far more sophisticated. They used encrypted messaging, diversified communication channels, and even overseas SIM cards to evade surveillance. But the authorities had also evolved — deploying arrests, economic pressure, and psychological intimidation. When fear failed, they turned to violence. Triad members were sent to attack civilians, sometimes alongside plain-clothes police. These staged clashes provided the pretext for a harsher crackdown, despite most protesters’ discipline and civility.

The movement finally subsided in 2020 amid COVID-19 and Beijing’s National Security Law, but its lessons endure.

Returning to Georgia, Russia’s social-media warfare is even more advanced — yet the logic is the same. Whether in Tbilisi or Hong Kong, the goal of authoritarian regimes is simple: destroy internal trust so that democratic movements collapse from within.

Defending democracy in this environment requires more than courage. It demands a whole-of-society defence. Only a whole-of-society shield — determined politicians to beef up national security law such as placing China onto the Enhanced Tier of the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme, an investigative media, technology platforms which complies with the law, and international allies to resist the disinformation playbook of Moscow and Beijing. This is the battle we could not fight alone.

That is why our party’s upcoming policy paper, “Protecting and Strengthening Democracy in the UK,” is so vital. I’ve been closely involved in shaping it, and a preview will be available at the next Conference.

Authoritarian regimes know that when democracies lose faith in themselves, they fall without a shot fired. Our task — in Georgia, in Hong Kong, and here at home — is to make sure that never happens.

* Larry is an elected representative in the Federal International Relations Committee and the ‘Against Authoritarianism’ sub-committee. He also chairs the Liberal Democrats Friends of Hong Kong.