Securitization of Disinformation in NATO Lexicon: A Computational Text Analysis

Following the Russian meddling in the 2016 US elections, disinformation and fake news became popular terms to help generate domestic awareness against foreign information operations globally. Today, a large number of politicians, diplomats and civil society leaders identify disinformation and fake news as a primary problem in both domestic and foreign policy contexts. But how do security institutions define disinformation and fake news in foreign and security policy, and how do their securitization strategies change over years? This article explores 238,452 tweets from official NATO and affiliated accounts, and more than 2,000 NATO texts, news, statements, and publications using computational methods since January 2014 and presents an unsupervised structural topic model (stm) analysis to explore the main thematic and discursive contexts of these texts. The study finds thatNATO’s threat discourse and securitization strategies are heavily influenced by US political lexicon and discovers that word choices change based on their likelihood of mobilizing alliance resources and cohesion. In addition, the study finds that NATO’s recent disinformation agenda is in fact a continuity of NATO’s long-standing Russia-focused securitization discourse and an attempt to mobilize alliance attention on Baltic states and Poland to counter Russia.