Liberal democracies are vulnerable to scaremongering, bigotry and fake news, writes Joyce Mcmillan

realms of conjecture, even of conspiracy theory. Yet in area after area, over the last few years, reputable news and academic sources suggest that account-holders based in Russia have been responsible for concerted online campaigns designed to promote disruptive or divisive beliefs in the West, often without any factual basis.

According to Twitter’s own report to the US Senate judicial committee, during the 2016 US presidential election, Russianbased “bots” or automated accounts retweeted Donald Trump’s online postings ten times more often than those of Hillary Clinton, and helped to promote “fake news” such as the widely-believed story

that the Clintons were involved in running a paedophile ring out of a Washington DC pizza business.

Reports are also rife that Russian money and online activities played a key role in Britain’s Brexit campaign, bankrolling some of its chief funders, and helping the Leave campaign to target vulnerable internet users.

And if we add to this the relentless promotion and publicising of extremist illiberal views across Europe, accompanied with a constant dripdrip of allegations that the mainstream media are concealing “the truth”, plus a steady backbeat of online whispering against “expert” opinion on everything from climate change to the measles vaccine, then a picture begins to build of a possible highly successful campaign of destabilisation against Western democracies.

“Media liars” was the roar of the Nazisaluting right-wing demonstrators in the German city of Chemnitz last week; and in Italy, one of the most popular policies of its alarming new coalition government is the abolition of compulsory measles vaccination, following an online campaign of scaremongering about vaccines co-ordinated – according to scientists at George Washington University – from some of those same