2025
By Henrik Pröpper, Michael Hameleers, Frederic Hopp, Boris Noordenbos, and Linda Bos
Russia’s cognitive warfare operations during its 2022-invasion of Ukraine represent a rising dimension of (international) conflict, with control over the virtual human mind as a central battlefield. Preliminary work proposes that cognitive attacks, employing hybrid information-conflict tactics, target moral biases within society, thereby aiming to hijack public discourse and create divisions in the worldviews of target societies. Using state-of-the art natural language processing methods (i.e., multi-lingual DeBERTa models and GPT) this project investigates the moralization of strategic communication surrounding the Russian invasion, thereby creating a computational tool for the deeper understanding of the “dark side of morality” in times of war.