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Europe’s Response to the Russian Information War — All You Need to Know
In recent memory, Russian foreign intervention in domestic politics reached top news coverage when it was revealed that Russia intentionally meddled in the 2016 US federal election, as the Democrat nominee, Hillary Clinton, stood against the soon-to-be US president, Donald Trump.
The research firm Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data for research that was then used to create political ads based on our preferences online that helped Trump ultimately win the federal election.
This served as a much-belated wake-up call to the possibility of foreign governments potentially altering the result of an election. A wake-up call that would shake up the European Union and make them pass laws that would take on this expanding information threat.
A study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute showed that between November 2016 and April 2019, at least twenty countries with elections and referenda experienced attempts at interference.
Some of this is directly Russian interference and included highly consequential votes like the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, and the French and German elections of 2017.
One common theme between all of these is that Russia has increasingly used social media as a means to a political end…
