Framing disinformation and malign foreign information influence: A focus on the electoral arena

The assault on the Capitol (2021) in Washington, DC – and its replication in Brazil (2023) – has alerted the world to the effects of social media exposure to unverified information bringing (old) unresolved knots back to the attention of global public opinion. Like industrial waste, fake news, misinformation and post-truth contribute to polluting the wells from which democracy is fed – the autonomy of the public sphere and the reliability of the information system. Social media, with their algorithmic logic, have helped to consolidate the disinformation dynamic by exposing open societies to foreign interference. Using a conceptual matrix approach as a methodological tool to systematize the literature highlights through conceptual connections, the authors identify four main arenas of malign foreign information influence. They subsequently apply a meta-analysis of the journal articles where political communication was involved, focusing specifically on the electoral/political arena to analyse the case of the 2016 US presidential election. Elections and political campaigns have always been targeted by foreign interference but never with such a degree of pervasiveness as shown in the 2016 election, which is a true example of how foreign interference can undermine democratic processes in a sovereign country by exploiting existing social divisions, influencing the minds of the public, threatening the integrity of voting systems and manipulating the media. The authors conclude by affirming the need to integrate foreign interference studies into political communication research as a further level of analysis since its features tend to become structural.