Description
This paper presents the findings of the second phase of the research programme “Informational Influence on National Security in a Geopolitical Context” (Ethical Clearance Ref: MRA-24/25-46914, King’s College London). The first phase developed a conceptual and ethical framework for examining informational threats to national security through semi-structured interviews with experts in security, policy, and media. The current phase extends this inquiry to the empirical analysis of media and public discourse in the United Kingdom.
The study investigates how narratives in traditional and digital media construct, mediate, and transform public perceptions of national security. It employs a mixed-methods approach combining discourse analysis, computational linguistics, and AI-assisted data processing to identify semantic patterns, framing strategies, and affective polarities across large-scale media datasets. This enables a systematic mapping of the interaction between media representations and public sentiment, revealing mechanisms through which informational influence shapes collective understandings of trust, threat, and security.
Special attention is given to periods of intensified informational contestation—such as crises, elections, and geopolitical tensions—when alignment between elite and public discourse becomes particularly consequential. Comparative analysis of journalistic, political, and social media communication highlights how specific linguistic and emotional strategies contribute to the securitisation or normalisation of issues within the public sphere.
By bridging expert-level insights with empirical evidence from communicative ecosystems, the research advances an integrated model of informational influence that conceptualises media as both an actor and an arena in national security dynamics.
