Countering Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) by Digital Authoritarianisms: Audience Architecture and Reverse Language Engineering.

This position paper, given the current state of NATO’s and EU’s communication on the Social Media and the evident superiority and efficiency of its opponents, discusses the need, to generate better communication capabilities, for a paradigm shift. This would favour the rapid and early deployment of narratives to support the messaging of Digital Democratic Actors (DDA) versus Digital Authoritarian Actors (DAA). Given that the Social Media are a fast-evolving complex framework, which we are still in the process of learning to interpret, it is advisable to put our emphasis on processes and methods, rather than tools. This position paper considers the problem from a SoMeInt / Digital Media Management Units perspective. It discusses what the specific target of this kind of communication should be and how is addressed by the DDA’s opponents. It then calls for a new paradigm that should include a detailed monitoring of specific discourse communities in order to generate the Language of the Neighbourhood. This is achieved by means of corpus linguistics techniques such as Audience Architecture and Reverse Language Engineering.