Imagine opening your phone one morning in Bulgaria, a few months before your country’s next parliamentary election, and seeing a flood of stories that seem designed to make you distrust everything and everyone. One post claims your government is handing military secrets to foreigners. Another says the electricity grid is about to fail because of corruption. A third suggests the only honest candidate is someone you had never heard of until yesterday. None of it may be true, but it all feels real, and it all feeds on the anxiety people already feel after years of political chaos. According to…

On a cool September evening, the kind that settles over the southern English city of Portsmouth with a salty edge from the Solent, a different kind of tension was building in the car park of the Marriott Hotel on Southampton Road in Cosham. A crowd of around forty to fifty people had gathered, their faces lit by the glow of mobile phones, their attention fixed on the hotel windows. Above them, small drones hummed in the night sky, circling the building like mechanical wasps, recording everything. The protestors had come armed with a belief that had spread like fire through…