Securitization of Disinformation in NATO’s Lexicon: A Computational Text Analysis

Following the Russian meddling in 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, civil society leaders identify as primary problems both policy contexts. But how do security institutions define policies, their securitization strategies change over years? Using computational methods, this article explores 238,452 tweets from official NATO affiliated accounts, well more than 2,000 texts, statements, publications since January 2014, presenting an unsupervised structural topic model (stm) analysis investigate main thematic discursive contexts these texts. The study finds that NATO’s threat discourse are heavily influenced by US’ political lexicon, organization’s word choice changes based on likelihood mobilizing alliance resources cohesion. In addition, suggests recent agenda is, fact, continuity long-standing Russia-focused strategy attempt mobilize Baltic states Poland support mission.