Political Subversion in the Age of Social Media

22 October 2018

The information space that is used by voters, politicians and interest groups in Western nations is being contested and challenged by new risks and threats, both from within and from without. The aim of this report is to identify some of the main vulnerabilities with respect to current forms of political subversion, and to propose a set of policy principles to guide ongoing reflections on how best to respond to that challenge.

Four areas of vulnerability are identified, namely individualised political messaging, group dynamics and political polarisation, platform algorithms and self-radicalisation, and falsehood dissemination dynamics. This leads to the formulation of four proposed policy principles, followed by a discussion of the extent to which recent measures, in selected Western nations and at EU level, are sufficient to address the challenge at hand.