Countering Fimi by Digital Authoritarianisms

Audience Architecture and Reverse Language Engineering

Bibliographic Data

ID17809629
AuthorsMichelangelo Conoscenti (0000-0002-1163-9235, University of Turin, corresponding author)
Year2026
Publication date2026-03-31
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueGlobal Policy (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1758-5880 • E-ISSN: 1758-5899
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/1758-5899.70157
OpenAlexW7144342615
LanguageEN
References cited19

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

Argumentation theory · Authoritarianism · Digital media · Narrative · Position paper · Social media · Software deployment · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Populism, Right-Wing Movements · Social Media and Politics · Architecture