Weaponizing Facts: How Revisionist States Polarize Foreign Audiences with Factual Content

Abstract

How do revisionist states leverage new technologies to disrupt foreign politics? Drawing on extensive elite interviews and insights from behavioral economics and social psychology, we argue that revisionist powers can use strategic narratives — factual accounts of issues controversial across pre-existing societal cleavages — to polarize voters through a combination of confirmation bias and reactance. Contrary to recent literature on fake news, we present evidence on the political economy of social media platforms that renders fake news impracticable and counter-productive in most markets. We test the effects of Russian strategic narratives using original survey experiments in Estonia. We show that exposure to factual content on migration and the Soviet legacy polarized Estonian voters along ethnolinguistic cleavages by making ethnic Estonians more likely to support right-leaning nationalist parties, while pushing the Russian-speaking minority to back left-leaning ethnic interest parties. A polarized population serves the revisionist state sender’s objective of paralyzing policy-making in the target state.

Keywords: Russia, information operations, strategic narratives, polarization