Countering FIMI by Digital Authoritarianisms: Audience Architecture and Reverse Language Engineering

Michelangelo Conoscenti

Foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) campaigns on social media are currently both more accessible and more impactful than the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) or European Union’s (EU), offering their opponents superiority and efficiency on those platforms. This position paper argues this development is a terrain of power and discusses the need for an urgent paradigm shift to generate better communication capabilities. Such a change would favour the rapid and early deployment of narratives to support the messaging from pluralist digital actors versus authoritarian digital actors and populist parties. As social media is a fast-evolving complex framework we are still learning to interpret, it is advisable to emphasise processes and methods rather than tools. Hence, this article considers the problem from a social media intelligence/digital media management unit perspective. It discusses what the specific target of this kind of communication should be and how to address it. This new paradigm should include a detailed monitoring of specific discourse communities in order to generate the language of the neighbourhood. This can be achieved via corpus linguistics techniques such as audience architecture and reverse language engineering.

The special issue “CTRL + Power: The Politics of Digital Authoritarianism” of Global Policy is published in open access with the financial support of Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo. The issue is part of the initiative “CTRL + power: the (geo)politics of digital authoritarianism”, an academic collaboration between T.wai, LSE IDEAS and the University of Torino.

 

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