Democracy in the Age of Disinformation: Lessons from European Elections
Russian hackers and alt-right propagandists, fake news, soft facts, bots and trolls....the digital age has vastly increased the scope for international, covert and overt influence campaigns to shape elections. How do such campaigns really work? Who is behind them? What do they tell us about the nature of democracy in an era where information borders have broken down, and where we have few rules about what sort of influence is legitimate and which malign?
Peter Pomerantsev, Sasha Havlicek and Chloe Colliver held a roundtable discussion on the changing threat and potential responses from policymakers, technology companies and civil society across Europe. Martin Kragh, head of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, was the moderator of the discussion.
This seminar was in collaboration with the Bertil Ohlin Institute.
Click here to read the MSB sponsored report "Smearing Sweden: International Influence Campaigns in the 2018 Swedish Election" on foreign attempts to influence the 2018 Swedish elections by Chloe Colliver, Peter Pomerantsev, Anne Appelbaum and Jonathan Birdwell.