UvA

Ever since the 2016 presidential election in the United States of America one of the recurrent questions has been whether this election was tempered with. Were the elections manipulated and, more importantly from a legal perspective, was international law violated during these foreign influence operations executed via cyberspace.
This research examines three influence operations below the threshold of the use of force executed via cyberspace, namely the 2016 United Kingdom’s referendum on EU membership, the 2016 American and the 2017 French presidential elections, and assesses whether these operations violated the international rules regarding respect for sovereignty and the prohibition of intervention.
Influence operations in cyberspace aim to alter the deliberate understanding and autonomous decision-making of another State. To achieve this, persuasive, compelling or manipulative mechanisms of influence are used. Manipulative influence operations used in the cases under discussion applied subconscious and covert techniques that subvert autonomous decision-making by deflecting the targeted audiences into making biased judgments based on heuristics.
The outcome of the research is that several activities executed during the cases under discussion indeed violated sovereignty or the prohibition of intervention. Though manipulative influence operations, executed remotely via cyberspace, would not amount to a violation of territorial integrity, they did breach political independence and hence sovereignty. The influence operations also violated the prohibition of intervention. Some manipulative influence activities equalled deliberate acts applying pressure designed to deprive actors of their freedom of choice amounting to coercion, which is the core element of intervention.