From my perspective, as a British person, the difference is that this is being done by British people to support British interests. As a person who lives in Britain, and by extension the west, and who supports the general values on which my society is based, I'm not interested in relativist comparisons. If the information war must be fought, I'd like us to win it.

It’s often not even a battle for hearts and minds en masse. Given the polarised state of many western democracies today it’s often just a few percent or less of the electorate one would need to influence to affect outcomes. Given this, with sufficient investment and scale, it seems alarmingly doable to me.

Depends on what you call the right cause. If you’ve joined the British army we can assume you think the UK’s interests are the right cause.

If everyone else is doing this they can’t very well not it too, it would be like not having an army when everyone else around you does.

One difference is the Russians have massive malware networks available from their criminal operations they can use for certain information operations, e.g. https://www.trustwave.com/Resources/SpiderLabs-Blog/Bedep-tr.... I have not seen anything on western governments doing anything close to that sort of thing.