Политическа и публична комуникация

Political and Public Communication

DOI 10.55206/HTNQ4230

 

Svetoslav Malinov

Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”

E-mail: ssmalinov@uni-sofia.bg

Abstract: This article examines how algorithmically mediated communication environments interact with pre-existing socio-cultural cleavages (SCCs) and collective cleavage identities (CCIs) to produce conditions in which foreign infor­ma­tion manipulation achieves durable political effects. Rather than cataloguing disinformation content, it examines the infrastructure through which identity-based divisions are produced, entrenched, and translated into electoral behaviour. The central argument is that the operational logic of contemporary platforms – algorithmic curation, virality incentives, and the structural amplification of emo­tionally resonant content – has accelerated CCI formation in ways that classical political communication theory has not adequately addressed. The article ad­vances two hypotheses: that digital environments accelerate the politicization of social divisions, and that information manipulation effectiveness depends pri­marily on the structure and contextual adaptation of information manipulation systems. Drawing on the SCC/CCI framework, the transnational cleavage theory of Hooghe and Marks, and empirical analysis of Bulgaria’s information manipula­tion ecosystem, the article traces how layered networks – spanning automated content infrastructure, narrative laundering through mainstream-adjacent outlets, coordinated messaging app amplification, and domestic political actors – exploit pre-existing identity structures to achieve strategic communicative effects at elec­toral scale. Bulgaria is shown to represent a distinctive model of domestically embedded foreign influence in which the boundaries between organic political discourse and coordinated manipulation have effectively dissolved.

 

Keywords: political communication; socio-cultural cleavages; collective cleavage identity; algorithmic mediation; foreign information manipulation; disinformation; democratic resilience.

1. Introductory Remarks

The relationship between political communication and democratic stability has been a central preoccupation of political science since the emergence of mass media as a structuring force in public life. Yet the conditions under which that relationship operates have been transformed more profoundly in the past decade than in comparison with any period since the advent of broadcast television. The migration of political identity formation into algorithmically curated digital environments – governed not by editorial judgment or civic norms but by systems designed to maximise user attention through the continuous amplification of emotionally resonant and divisive content – has introduced dynamics that existing theoretical frameworks are only beginning to register. When these structural shifts intersect with malign foreign interference, the implications for democratic communication are of a qualitatively different order than the distortions that political communication research has conventionally analyzed. [1]

This article addresses that intersection. It examines how the algorithmic logic of contemporary social media platforms interacts with two analytically distinct but deeply intertwined formations: socio-cultural cleavages (SCCs) and collective cleavage identities (CCIs). These constitute the structural substratum through which disinformation achieves political traction – the fault lines along which societies fracture, and the identity formations that render those fractures electorally legible. In post-communist societies particularly, where democratic transitions produced deep reservoirs of collective disillusionment and where historical memory remains fiercely contested, these formations have proven exceptionally susceptible to deliberate instrumentalisation. It is precisely here that foreign actors have learned to intervene, deploying layered infrastructural information operations designed to convert latent social division into measurable electoral impact.

The empirical focus is Bulgaria, a European Union member state that presents in concentrated and well-documented form what may be the most advanced example in the European context of a fully domestically embedded foreign information manipulation ecosystem. [2] Disinformation narratives are not simply imposed from outside the country but are absorbed, translated, and amplified by local media outlets and political actors operating from within Bulgaria’s own information environment. Here, the Bulgarian case is not treated as an anomaly but as a theoretically generative instance: understanding how foreign malign messaging achieves domestic naturalization, how they come to circulate as apparently organic political discourse, indistinguishable to ordinary audiences from indigenous communication, illuminates the systemic conditions under which the epistemic infrastructure of democratic public discourse is rendered inoperative. [3]

The argument contributes to three intersecting bodies of scholarship: (1) the political dynamics of cleavage formation, (2) the communication studies on disinformation and media manipulation, (3) the emerging governance research on platform regulation and democratic resilience. Its core proposition – that algorithmically accelerated collective cleavage identity formation represents a qualitatively new vulnerability in democratic political communication – has implications that extend well beyond the Bulgarian case to any democratic context in which weak institutional mediation, platform governance gaps, and deep reservoirs of unprocessed social grievance coincide. [4]

2. Theoretical Framework: From Structural Cleavages to Digital Identities

The foundational account of political cleavages developed by Lipset and Rokkan [5] established the conceptual vocabulary through which political scientists have understood the structural bases of democratic party competition for more than half a century. Tracing enduring axes of political division: center-periphery, church-state, urban-rural, capital-labor, to the historical processes of state formation and industrialization, this framework illuminated how social conflicts become institutionally solidified into durable alignments that reproduce themselves across generations. Its core insight remains indispensable: political divisions are not simply aggregates of momentary preferences but the sedimented outcomes of historical processes, acquiring organizational embodiment and identity investment that sustain them long after their originating conditions have changed.

The transnational extension proposed by Hooghe and Marks [6] adapted this tradition to the political realignments produced by globalization and supranational integration, identifying a new axis of division that sets cosmopolitan orientations, centred on openness and supranational governance, against nationalist ones centred on sovereignty, cultural homogeneity, and communal protection. Critically, they argued that this cleavage is not simply reflected by political parties but is actively shaped by political entrepreneurs who mobilize around emerging lines of conflict in real time, opening the analytical possibility that cleavage formation is not merely a long-run structural process but also a strategic communicative practice subject to deliberate acceleration and manipulation. [7]

The concepts of SCCs and CCIs carry this logic to the level where manipulation most effectively operates. SCCs designate the experiential and perceptual dimensions of group belonging: the senses of affinity and differentiation that individuals develop in relation to communities defined by cultural, historical, or values-based criteria, and the normative commitments those affiliations entail [8]. Unlike economic class or formal religious membership, SCCs operate beneath the threshold of explicit political organization – felt rather than declared, shaping patterns of trust, communication, and judgment as background orientations. CCIs are the value-laden identity categories through which these latent orientations acquire shared cultural salience and become available for political activation: identity formations that carry normative weight, employed in everyday self-positioning and intergroup evaluation, generating antagonistic orientations capable of surfacing as political force in conditions of deliberate manipulation. [9]

As Bornschier [10] has argued, the capacity to identify, cultivate, and activate collective identity formations that conventional political analysis has failed to register is a central mechanism through which contemporary political disruptions, such as sudden electoral reversals or the rapid consolidation of previously marginal political forces are achieved. In post-communist Europe, the repository of latent SCCs available for such activation is vast. Democratic transitions produced serious grievances – the privatization was accompanied by mass unemployment and the dismantling of social welfare structures that were absorbed by significant portions of the population not as liberation but as dispossession. [11] Previous research has demonstrated how these orientations are converted into disinformation narratives through the rhetorical invocation of an idealized past. [12] This article takes that established finding as a starting point and examines the communicative infrastructure and platform dynamics through which such conversion is organized and amplified at scale.

The digital transformation of the public sphere has introduced a qualitative shift in the conditions of SCC consolidation and CCI activation that existing theory has not adequately explained. Social media platforms are not neutral environments for the expression of pre-existing political identities; they are systems that actively shape the conditions under which identities form. Their algorithmic recommendation systems are optimized for engagement: a metric that systematically prioritizes content generating strong affective responses over content that is merely accurate or analytically rich (Bail et al., 2018). [13] Content that activates identity boundaries, sharpens in-group solidarity against external threat, or produces experiences of belonging and estrangement propagates further and faster than content oriented toward deliberative reasoning. In societies where institutional trust is low, media literacy limited, and independent local journalism is under severe pressure, this design logic creates communication environments fundamentally biased toward identity consolidation and division-sharpening, independently of any deliberate manipulation. [14]

3. Hypothesis

The central hypothesis is that algorithmically mediated communication environments have compressed the temporal dynamics of CCI formation, enabling foreign malign actors to accelerate the crystallization of latent socio-cultural divisions into electorally actionable political identities within timeframes that render conventional monitoring and institutional response framework structurally inadequate. A corollary hypothesis holds that the effectiveness of foreign information manipulation is a function not primarily of the persuasive quality of individual disinformation claims but of the organizational depth of the manipulation infrastructure and its calibration to pre-existing SCC configurations in target audiences.

4. Research Methodology

4.1 Research Aim and Questions

This article aims to develop a theoretical framework for understanding foreign information manipulation as a coordinated mode of information warfare that operates through the exploitation of algorithmically accelerated collective identity formation. It seeks to answer three interconnected research questions: (1) How have digital platform dynamics altered the conditions under which socio-cultural cleavages consolidate into politically actionable collective cleavage identities? (2) What organizational architecture characterizes sophisticated foreign manipulation ecosystems, and how does that architecture exploit SCC and CCI structures? (3) What are the implications of this analysis for democratic communication theory and for the governance of information environments in institutionally fragile democracies?

4.2 Research Design and Methods

The article employs a single case study design, using Bulgaria as a critical case that illuminates dynamics of broader analytical relevance across post-communist Europe. The case selection is justified on the grounds of analytical transparency: Bulgaria presents, in concentrated and well-documented form, the full range of manipulation ecosystem features whose interaction the theoretical framework seeks to explain [15]. Findings from the Romanian context are incorporated as a comparative reference point to assess the generalizability of key mechanisms.

The empirical analysis draws on four areas. First, systematic review of existing monitoring studies and infrastructure analyses produced through open-source intelligence (OSINT) methodologies, including backlink network analysis, domain registration pattern analysis, and coordinated behavior detection in social platform data. Second, analysis of audience measurement and content distribution data from Bulgarian digital platforms, including engagement metrics, amplification patterns, and cross-platform content tracking. Third, review of EU-level regulatory documentation, electoral monitoring reports, and platform compliance assessments. Fourth, secondary analysis of survey data on political attitudes, media consumption, and disinformation susceptibility among Bulgarian and broader Central and Eastern European populations.

4.3 Methodological Steps

The analysis proceeds through three stages. The first stage establishes the theoretical framework, synthesizing the cleavage theory literature with scholar­ship on platform dynamics and algorithmic mediation to develop the concept of algorithmically accelerated CCI formation. The second stage maps the empirical structure of the Bulgarian manipulation ecosystem across its constituent layers, drawing on the monitoring literature to characterize each layer’s organizational logic and communicative function. The third stage analyzes the narrative repertoire through which the ecosystem operates and its electoral-scale effects, relating specific narrative clusters to the SCC configurations they target and the CCI formations they activate.

5. Results
   • The Structure of a Domestically Embedded Manipulation Ecosys­tem

The Bulgarian case is analytically distinctive because it represents a model that has achieved something qualitatively different from the transnational intrusion patterns documented in most Western European contexts. Where operations, such as Doppelgänger or Operation Overload, coordinated external campaigns that clone legitimate media or flood newsrooms with fabricated content to inject Kremlin narratives into Western information spaces, function as external intrusions into relatively independent domestic media environments, Bulgaria’s ecosystem represents a state in which foreign strategic narratives have been absorbed, naturalized, and reproduced by domestic actors over a sufficient period so that they now circulate as apparently indigenous political communication. [16] The ecosystem operates through five interconnected layers whose cumulative effect is the normalization of foreign strategic narratives as the natural background of Bulgarian political discourse.

• The first layer is narrative origination infrastructure. State-controlled or state-proximate foreign entities produce the strategic framing from which downstream content derives. The Bulgarian component of the Pravda network – a globally distributed system of automated websites, publishes close to six thousand Bulgarian-language articles monthly yet attracts fewer than fifteen hundred direct human visitors. Its architecture is not designed for human readership: it is optimized for search engine crawling and AI indexing, whose primary function is to manipulate algorithmic visibility rather than directly persuade readers. [17] This shift from content designed for human audiences to material optimized for machine ingestion targets the algorithmic systems that determine the information citizens encounter when verifying claims. It represents a qualitative advancement in manipulation strategies, the theoretical implications of which political communication scholars have only just begun to assess.
• The second layer performs translation and contextual adaptation. A small number of Bulgarian-language online outlets convert foreign disinformation narratives into locally resonant political claims. Sys­tematic backlink analysis has documented direct, persistent connections between leading outlets in this category and sanctioned Russian state media – establishing these outlets not merely as ideologically aligned but as operational nodes in a coordinated information infrastructure that violates EU sanctions regimes. [18]
• The third layer is narrative laundering – the republication of strategically adapted content through mainstream-adjacent outlets that gives them the credibility of mass-circulation journalism. Major news platforms with substantial daily readerships mix pro-Kremlin framing with credible reporting on domestic affairs, embedding strategic narratives within the ambient information environment. Monitoring analysis has established that over 60% of articles on key politically sensitive topics in the Bulgarian information space originate from outlets with documented records of publishing misleading content [19] This laundering function differentiates the Bulgarian ecosystem from simpler. information influ­ence models: pro-Kremlin framing permeates the mainstream informa­tion environment to a degree that renders disinformation and genuine journalism distinction analytically untenable.
• The fourth layer consists of automated content flooding infrastructure. Networks of several hundred near-identical websites manufacture the appearance of widespread independent agreement, creating quantitative signals of consensus that influence both human perception and algorithmic ranking. [20]
• The fifth layer is coordinated social platform amplification, with Tele­gram occupying a structurally central position. Analysis of Bulgarian Telegram channels connected to the manipulation network reveals that the ten most active nodes control nearly two-thirds of all amplification activity, while the broader network functions as a structured distribution mechanism rather than a community of organically engaged partici­pants. On virtually every monitored topic, the highest-engagement Tele­gram channels carry pro-Kremlin or conspiratorial content. Far from operating at the margins of political discourse, they constitute the dominant presence on the platforms through which a significant portion of Bulgarians access political information.

• Narrative Repertoire and CCI Activation

The network is structured around a specific repertoire of strategies whose design logic targets pre-existing CCI structures rather than seeking to persuade the undecided:

• The first strategic cluster targets institutional and procedural legitimacy. The systematic circulation of claims about voting machine compromise and electoral fraud converts accumulated institutional distrust into active disengagement from democratic participation. The narrative that voting is pointless has been documented as the single most widely accepted disinformation claim among young Bulgarians, registered as true by over half of those surveyed. [21] After eight parliamentary elections in five years, the manipulation ecosystem does not manu­facture this disillusionment but systematically amplifies and deepens it, converting a diffuse CCI of institutional estrangement into active elec­toral abstention.

A second cluster targets geopolitical orientation and has acquired particular salience following Bulgaria’s Eurozone accession in January 2026. The common currency has been communicatively transformed through the manipulation ecosystem into a vehicle for narratives of sovereignty erosion. Domestic political actors have framed adoption as „annexation,“ organized protests, and in February 2025 mobilized supporters in an attempt to storm the European Commission representation in Sofia. [22] A late-2025 Eurobarometer finding that nearly half of Bulgarians opposed the currency transition reflects the cumulative effect of years of identity-targeted communication that has attached the transnational cleavage between European integration and national sovereignty to everyday economic anxieties. [23]

A third cluster engages security narratives and attitudes toward the war in Ukraine, deploying repeatedly debunked claims about Bulgarian military equipment being used against ethnic Bulgarian populations, and framing Western military support as reckless escalation. Former military officials positioned as credible security commentators lend apparent expertise to these narratives. [24] The cognitive effect is not primarily informational but identity-forming: it repositions geopolitical alignment from a policy judgment to a question of communal loyalty, embedding security choices within the deeper grammar of national belonging.

What distinguishes this repertoire from simpler propaganda models is the degree to which its individual clusters cross-reinforce one another, producing not a set of discrete false claims but a coherent interpretive framework; a total account of political reality in which every new development confirms the same underlying narrative. Economic anxieties are linked to European integration; integration is linked to sovereignty loss; sovereignty loss is linked to energy de­pen­dence on Western alternatives; the war in Ukraine is linked to NATO militarism; NATO is linked to the sacrifice of Bulgarian national interests. This is the communicative architecture of what the relevant literature has identified as cognitive warfare – the systematic reshaping not of specific beliefs but of the evaluative frameworks within which beliefs are formed and evidence is assessed. [25]

6. Discussion

The Bulgarian case bears out both hypotheses. The speed at which latent socio-cultural divisions were converted into electorally legible identities, outpacing any institutional capacity to monitor, attribute, or respond, reflects precisely the temporal compression that platform-mediated manipulation makes possible. That compression is most visible in its electoral residue: the consolidation of support for explicitly anti-EU and anti-NATO political forces, the mainstreaming of narratives about European subjugation that would have been confined to the political fringe a decade ago, and the near-total dominance of pro-Kremlin content in the highest-engagement social media channels. Taken together, these are not discrete outcomes but the accumulated electoral crystallization of manufactured CCI formations – latent divisions that were identified, amplified, and hardened into voting behaviour faster than democratic institutions could register what was happening.

The corollary hypothesis, that manipulation effectiveness is a function of infrastructure depth and SCC calibration rather than persuasive quality, is equally confirmed. The ecosystem’s most consequential feature is not any individual disinformation claim but the organizational architecture that ensures strategic narratives achieve mainstream reach with minimal external fingerprints. The laundering function performed by mainstream-adjacent outlets, the coordinated amplification achieved through Telegram networks, and the political legitimation provided by domestic actors together produce a communicative environment in which the provenance of strategic narratives has been effectively obscured.

The Romanian presidential election of November 2024 provides a comparative reference point that reinforces these conclusions. The rapid consolidation of a previously marginal candidate’s electoral support through algorithmically amplified TikTok content demonstrates that elections function as the trigger event through which foreign information manipulation escalates to an operational tempo that reactive regulatory enforcement cannot match. [26] A similar process had unfolded in Bulgaria a year earlier, enabling the parliamentary entry of a pro-Russian political formation through comparable dynamics; the failure to institutionalize lessons from that episode before Romania made them internationally visible illustrates the systemic character of the learning deficit that manipulation actors rely upon. [27]

The governance implications are significant. No Bulgarian institution currently maintains an independent capacity to systematically identify coordinated manipulation patterns; this function has been performed almost entirely by civil society and independent research actors. [28] The interval between the emergence of an information influence operation (IIO) and the completion of institutional processes that might authorize a response is precisely the interval in which the operation achieves its communicative objectives. The emerging European regulatory architecture – the Digital Services Act, the DSA Elections Toolkit, the EEAS FIMI Toolbox, provides meaningful tools for addressing this structural mismatch. [29] Evidence from recent electoral monitoring cycles indicates that proactive engagement of these mechanisms can produce results: structured early escalation through the Rapid Response System (RRS) during the 2024 European Parliament elections generated platform responses in all documented cases. [30] The gap between this demonstrated potential and actual operational deployment by national institutions, widest in those member states most exposed to coordinated IIOs, remains the central challenge for public authorities. [31]

7. Conclusion

This article has developed a framework for understanding foreign information manipulation as an infrastructural phenomenon that operates through the exploitation of algorithmically accelerated collective identity formation. The Bulgarian case illustrates with empirical clarity how a layered manipulation ecosystem achieves domestic embeddedness; how foreign strategic narratives become, over time, the naturalized background of domestic political discourse, indistinguishable to ordinary audiences from organic political communication.

This article’s central theoretical contribution is the concept of algorithmi­cally accelerated CCI formation and what it demands of the field. Classical cleavage theory was built on the assumption that collective political identities consolidate slowly, through the sedimentation of structural grievances across generations. That assumption no longer holds when platform architecture can compress that process into a single electoral cycle, and when foreign actors have learned to exploit that compression deliberately. The classical models remain indispensable for understanding the structural raw material of manipulation – the fault lines that make societies vulnerable – but they cannot account for the ve­locity at which those fault lines are now being activated, widened, and translated into political force. A theory adequate to contemporary democratic vulnerability must treat temporal acceleration itself as a variable, not a background condition.

For political communication scholarship, the deepest implication is that the study of political messages, frames, and persuasion must be preceded by the study of the infrastructural conditions that determine whether democratic communication is possible at all. If the velocity of manipulation now outpaces conventional institutional response, then media independence, platform ac­countability, civic literacy, and regulatory capacity cannot be treated as back­ground features of democratic societies that persist without investment they are achievements that erode under structural pressure and must be actively main­tained. Understanding those conditions and the ways in which they can be captured, manipulated, and restored is among the most consequential theoretical and practical tasks the field now faces.

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Svetoslav Malinov is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Philosophy, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. His dissertation is titled “Russian Disinformation in the Western Balkans and Bulgaria: Models and Methodology for Recognition Based on Cleavage Theory”. His research focuses on foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI), state and media capture, democratic erosion, and information integrity. He has authored and co-authored publications on Russian hybrid warfare strategies, democratic vulnerabilities, and the role of social cleavages in spreading disinformation. His latest work, “Weaponizing History: Nostalgic Populism, Socio-Cultural Cleavages, and Disinformation”, is published in the NATO Science for Peace and Security Series D.

Manuscript was submitted: 30.05.2026.

Double Blind Peer Reviews: from 02.06.2026 till 02.07.2026.

Accepted: 04.07.2026.

Брой 68 на сп. „Реторика и комуникации“ (юли 2026 г.) се издава с финансова­та помощ на Фонд научни изследвания, договор № КП-06-НП7/23 от 08 декември 2025 г.

Issue 68 of the Rhetoric and Communications Journal (July 2026) is published with the financial support of the Scientific Research Fund, Contract No. KP-06-NP7/23 of December 08, 2025.