Understanding Citizens’ Vulnerabilities (II): From Disinformation to Hostile Narratives

This report analyses how disinformation campaigns have evolved into more complex hostile narratives, taking Italy, France, and Spain as case studies to prove what has been observed and determined from analytical and numerical research. the last years, malicious actors have been able to rely on much more sophisticated and organized disinformation campaigns in an attempt to manipulate citizens’ perceptions. Technological advances have provided producers and sharer of distorted information with new powerful means to reach an ever-wider audience. of the reasons this system of propaganda and disinformation is so effective and successful is that it deceives ordinary citizens into sharing false stories within their own circle of friends and acquaintances, while platforms’ algorithms have the capacity to pick these messages up very quickly and amplify it on an unprecedented scale. Most of this content is not designed to channel people into a particular direction, but to create confusion and erode the trust in our media, institutions and eventually, democracy itself. narratives target feelings and emotions and touch upon specific social vulnerabilities. They are made of true and false information, where the narration of facts counts more than the facts themselves. They rely on negatively charged emotions, like fear or anger, in order to lower the means of rational self-defence and trigger self-survival instincts, creating a psychological condition that makes the brain respond positively rather than negatively to bigoted statements and divisive rhetoric. should be said that public figures and the media in recent years have played a key role in disseminating false and unsupported information. There has been a dramatic rise in the number and type of news programs available, including a troubling number of partisan programs that often feature false or exaggerated information. In the last decades, foreign interference has been pushed by the belief that by breaking the Euro-Atlantic link, the West would end as a strategic entity. Russian military interventions in Georgia in 2008 and in Crimea in 2014, China’s Massive Belt and Road Initiative in Eurasia and the mosaic of sovereigntist and populist parties that have revamped anti-Americanism and anti-globalism, combined with sudden asymmetric cyberwarfare, can describe the most formidable and dangerous challenge that democracies are facing since the fall of the Berlin Wall. report will highlight in chapter 2 how hostile narratives target citizens’ vulnerabilities exploiting fear mongering using algorithmic content curation. In Chapter 3, the case studies will describe how different disinformation campaigns have been used in Italy, France and Spain, while chapter 4 will provide examples on how hostile disinformation narratives were employed in France and Italy.