All Azimuth: A Journal of Foreign Policy and Peace 2146-7757 2757-9026 İhsan Doğramacı Barış Vakfı 10.20991/allazimuth.1110500 International Relations Uluslararası İlişkiler Securitization of Disinformation in NATO’s Lexicon: A Computational Text Analysis https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6932-8325 Ünver Akın Özyeğin University https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5628-328X Kurnaz Ahmet CANAKKALE ONSEKIZ MART UNIVERSITY 07 30 2022 11 2 211 231 05 04 2021 01 31 2022 Copyright © 2012, All Azimuth: A Journal of Foreign Policy and Peace 2012 All Azimuth: A Journal of Foreign Policy and Peace

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

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