People, Populism, and the Perils of Disinformation

Conflict has increasingly gone online. Today’s methods of warfare include those that are “under threshold”, that is, those that are not explicit deployments of force or violence. Instead, attempts to destabilise a society or country, either by state or non-state actors, bypasses more traditional forms of warfare and targets the hearts and minds of civilian populations directly. As part of a hybrid or grey zone warfare strategy, cyber attacks including mis- and disinformation often target existing vulnerabilities in a society to further exacerbate these, with the goal to create more discord. Ordinary people, and their reactions to cyber attacks on infrastructure/services and/or disinformation, play a central role in the success or failure of such attacks. Often people react as a consequence of their own trust levels towards each other as well as to their authorities. Trust, mistrust, and distrust do not operate in a linear fashion however, and are expressed differently in different parts of a society. In this talk I want to discuss how trust/mistrust/distrust operates in two different cases – Norway (known for high societal trust levels) and the United States (lower societal trust levels). Both societies have seen the rise of populist trends, which itself reflects a distrust of authorities or “elites”. I will present some examples of where disinformation has or can play a role in exacerbating distrust within certain segments of society.