From performance to infrastructure: Governing political fear in the platform age

Introduction

In an era increasingly defined by data-driven communication and algorithmic governance, political power is no longer exercised solely through institutions and laws. It is also enacted through visibility, emotion, and attention. Among the emotions most frequently mobilised in this context, fear stands out as both a political resource and a mode of symbolic governance. This article examines how fear functions not only as a rhetorical device but also as a socio-technical and affective infrastructure shaped by the design, logic, and policy environment of digital platforms. The analysis argues that platform-mediated political communication transforms fear into an infrastructural feature of governance, making it algorithmically amplified, emotionally routinised, and politically performative.

Building on research in political communication, media studies, and internet governance, the study argues that contemporary populist and authoritarian actors have institutionalised fear through platform logics, producing an infrastructure of fear. This infrastructure emerges from the interplay of symbolic performance, including threat narratives and identity politics, platform affordances that amplify emotionally salient content, and governance gaps reflected in weak enforcement against emotionally manipulative practices in online political advertising. In this way, political fear becomes highly visible and structurally embedded, influencing which topics gain traction, how they are framed, and who is perceived as legitimate within democratic discourse.

The analysis uses three complementary lenses to clarify how this infrastructuralisation works across levels. At the micro level, political communication relies on managed appearances that separate frontstage performances from backstage coordination in mediated public life (Goffman, 1959). At the meso level, media logics reward high-arousal formats and threat-oriented scripts, which can make fear communicatively durable and politically reusable (Altheide & Snow, 1979; Altheide, 2016). At the macro level, platform infrastructures link these dynamics to governance by repeatedly rewarding fear-laden cues through ranking, recommendation, and advertising systems, thereby scaling them across publics even without explicit political intent (Yeung, 2018; van Dijck et al., 2018).

This examination is situated at the intersection of internet policy and affective governance. Specifically, it examines how platform technologies contribute to the normalisation of fear-based political communication and how this trend interacts with European-level regulatory frameworks such as the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) (Regulation 2022/2065, 2022; Regulation 2024/1083, 2024). While these initiatives introduce important tools for content governance and transparency, they remain limited in addressing the emotional and symbolic operations of digital political discourse.

Methodologically, the article combines conceptual synthesis with empirical case illustrations, focusing on the communicative strategies of Donald Trump in the United States and Viktor Orbán in Hungary. The cases show two distinct but structurally convergent models of fear governance. One is disruptive and improvisational, and the other is centralised and institutionally embedded. Both rely on platform infrastructures that reward affective engagement and shape public attention in ways that challenge democratic resilience.

Ultimately, this article makes two contributions to the field of internet policy. First, it reorients the study of political fear from the level of discourse to that of infrastructural design, suggesting that emotional manipulation is not merely a communicative outcome but a socio-technical condition. Second, it proposes a shift in regulatory thinking from content-centric approaches to structure-aware models that consider the emotional, symbolic, and algorithmic dimensions of political communication. The conclusion invites policymakers, scholars, and civil society actors to view the governance of fear as a matter of platform architecture and regulatory imagination alongside rights and norms. Addressing platform-mediated fear amplification requires coalitions across media regulation, data governance, affect theory, and digital rights advocacy that confront not only disinformation but also the emotional architectures that sustain algorithmic populism.

1. Theoretical framework

This article’s theoretical backbone combines media logic and attention-based politics to explain why fear becomes a strategically valuable communicative format in competitive visibility environments, and it connects this to platform governance to show how that format can become an infrastructural condition of circulation. In this architecture, David L. Altheide and Robert P. Snow’s concept of media logic specifies the communicative grammar through which threats are made intelligible, repeatable, and newsworthy, while attention-based politics highlights why emotionally salient performances are rewarded in crowded, metric-driven arenas (Altheide & Merkovity, 2022; Altheide & Snow, 1979; Altheide, 2006, 2016; Merkovity, 2017). Erving Goffman’s conceptual vocabulary is used more selectively as a micro-sociological lens to describe how political actors organise credibility and threat through situated framing and the management of impressions across frontstage and backstage work (Goffman, 1959). To link performance to governance, the analysis draws on algorithmic regulation and platform-society perspectives to clarify mechanisms through which recommender systems, ranking, and advertising infrastructures can recurrently reward high-arousal signals, including fear-laden cues, even when “fear” is not an explicit platform objective (Yeung, 2018; van Dijck et al., 2018; Zuboff, 2019). This framing rejects single-agent accounts and locates fear amplification in the interaction of political strategy, optimisation dynamics, and regulatory conditions.

This provides the bridge from staged performances of fear to infrastructural effects. Governance-by-design captures how platforms can shape user conduct through coded incentives and default settings, which generate normative environments through infrastructure rather than direct legal command (Yeung, 2018). Surveillance capitalism highlights how affective states such as anxiety and outrage are rendered operational as behavioural data and become economically valuable inputs for prediction and modification (Zuboff, 2019). Platform-society approaches add an institutional layer by treating platforms as hybrid infrastructures that organise sociality through technical design, governance arrangements, and power relations (van Dijck et al., 2018). Under these conditions, fear is best understood not only as a rhetorical resource but also as a digitally embedded mode of political governance that can be reproduced by ranking, recommendation, and advertising systems.

1.1. Fear as affective infrastructure in platform environments

Fear in contemporary political communication is socially constructed and technically encoded in the infrastructures that organise visibility and interaction. Building on Goffman (1986) and Altheide (2006, 2016), this article approaches fear as an affective infrastructure, a patterned emotional register that becomes normalised through repeated performances and continuous digital interactions. On platforms such as Facebook and YouTube, fear is curated and circulated through engagement-based ranking and recommendation systems, and monetised through advertising-driven datafication that turns attention into economic value (Covington et al., 2016; Guess et al., 2023; Sadowski, 2019).

Algorithms play a constitutive role here. As Yeung (2018) argues, governance-by-design strategies do not merely structure choice – they construct normative environments. Surveillance capitalism further demonstrates how fear, anxiety, and outrage function as behavioural data inputs that are mined, predicted, and commodified (Zuboff, 2019). Within this infrastructure, political actors learn to perform fear in algorithmically legible formats, which are brief, visual, repetitive, and emotionally explicit. The result is not only a communicative strategy but a socio-technical condition that inserts affective polarisation into the architecture of political visibility.

Erving Goffman’s (1959,1986) dramaturgical model provides a valuable framework for interpreting how fear is staged in politics. Political actors operate in a dual environment of frontstage and backstage performances. On the frontstage (in public debates, press conferences, campaign rallies, and on social media), politicians enact fear-inducing narratives to shape the audience’s perception of threats, often invoking existential risks (e.g., terrorism, migration, crime) to legitimise exceptional measures. These performances are tightly scripted and emotionally charged, designed to evoke primaeval responses and reinforce in-group/out-group boundaries. Meanwhile, the backstage, including strategic planning, message testing, and polling, reflects a calculated use of fear as a rhetorical device, instead of an expression of a genuine emotional state.

For example, a leader may post a short video staged at a border checkpoint that foregrounds control and urgency, presenting migration as an imminent threat. Offstage, the same issue is translated into tested slogans, cropped clips, and targeting segments, then adjusted through feedback from engagement and campaign monitoring. In this way, frontstage performance and backstage optimisation operate as connected moments within a repeatable communicative routine rather than as separate phenomena (Goffman, 1986).

Goffman’s framework aligns closely with the notion of media logic, wherein fear becomes embedded in the narrative formats and symbolic codes of contemporary media (Altheide, 2016; Altheide & Snow, 1979). Fear is not simply represented but constructed through recurring formats, such as dramatic visuals, simplistic binaries, repetitive soundbites, and emotionally charged symbols. Media rituals, like the coverage of criminal events, terrorist threats, or border crises, serve as performance stages for political actors to frame issues through the lens of urgency and danger (Couldry, 2003; Fitzgerald, 2025).

Symbolic interactionism further explains that fear becomes meaningful only in interaction. According to Herbert Blumer (1969), meanings arise through social processes, instead of inhering in objects or events. Politicians label certain groups as threats (illegals, migrants, terrorists, enemies of the nation) and rely on media amplification to normalise these frames. The continuous reinforcement of such definitions, particularly in digital spaces, transforms them into social facts that shape public emotions and perceptions of reality.

This construction of fear is performative in a dual sense. It mobilises action (e.g., voting, protesting, accepting surveillance) and reproduces symbolic hierarchies (e.g., citizen vs. alien, insider vs. outsider, safe vs. dangerous). The more these performances succeed in grabbing attention, the more political power they accrue. In this way, fear becomes not only an affective state but a symbolic resource – intentionally cultivated and used in competitive arenas of attention.

1.2. Mediatisation, media logic, and the rise of attention-based politics

The mediatisation of politics represents a structural transformation in which political communication is increasingly shaped by the rules, norms, and formats of media systems (Hjarvard, 2008; Strömbäck & Esser, 2014). This process intensifies in the digital era, where the logic of visibility replaces deliberative rationality. At the heart of this transformation lies the convergence of media logic and attention-based politics – a phenomenon in which visibility, emotional impact, and symbolic performance dominate over substantive content.

Media logic could be understood as a structural constraint. It is defined as the forms and formats through which media shape not only content but the conduct of communicative action (Altheide & Snow, 1979). In mediatised political systems, actors learn to operate according to media logic, dramatising conflict, simplifying narratives, and personalising messages in ways that conform to media genres. Media logic prioritises immediacy, visuality, affect, and repetition – features that lend themselves particularly well to the communication of fear and crisis. This shift does not imply that media merely reflect reality – they construct it. As Altheide (2016) argues, political meaning is increasingly produced through a media ecology that formats public issues into symbolic binaries: us versus them, safe versus dangerous, order versus chaos. Fear thus becomes coded into recurring narrative frames – crime reports, border threats, cultural invasions – that circulate across platforms and become ambient features of political discourse. The strategic adaptation of political actors to this logic results in self-mediatisation (Blumler, 2013), where political content is pre-formatted for maximal visibility. In this framework, fear is not simply communicated; it is amplified through formats that prioritise emotional salience and algorithmic reach.

While traditional models of political communication, such as agenda-setting (McCombs & Shaw, 1972), focused on issue salience in elite-driven contexts, attention-based politics reorients the focus toward symbolic performance in networked public spheres. Attention-based politics describes a shift in which politicians seek to maximise audience engagement by presenting themselves – or the issues they champion – as the primary spectacle (Merkovity, 2017). The message is not necessarily a policy proposal, but a symbolic act designed to capture visibility in a crowded media environment. This model resonates with rational inattention theory (Sims, 2003), which suggests that individuals allocate limited cognitive resources only to stimuli that stand out. In digital spaces, political messages compete not just with other political content but with memes, influencers, entertainment, and crises. Hence, political actors who conform to media logic – employing affective cues, repetition, and controversy – are more likely to penetrate the attention economy (Altheide & Merkovity, 2022; Li, 2021). This logic explains the performative excesses of populist leaders who stage fear through personalised narratives, polarising symbols, and direct engagement. These performances are not incidental – they are strategic responses to a media system in which being seen is synonymous with being legitimate.

In summary, media logic and attention-based politics mutually reinforce each other. The former provides the structural grammar, the latter the strategic repertoire. Together, they underpin a new mode of political communication in which fear is not merely a message, but a mediatised experience optimised for circulation, engagement, and resonance. The following section briefly explores the historical emergence of fear in political communication and then examines its contemporary characteristics.

2. Historical genealogies of fear in political communication

The use of fear as a tool in political communication is not an innovation of the digital era. Rather, it is a recurring rhetorical and symbolic strategy that has accompanied modern statecraft since the emergence of mass media (Thebuwana, 2023). To understand how fear operates in contemporary attention-based politics, it is essential to situate current practices within their historical trajectories. These genealogies not only reveal the structural continuity of fear mobilisation but also help trace the shifting forms, logics, and technologies through which fear is constructed and disseminated.

From the anti-communist campaigns of the Cold War to the securitisation narratives following the 9/11 attacks, fear has consistently served as a powerful instrument for legitimising exceptional measures, redefining citizenship boundaries, and fostering emotional alignment with political leadership. Each of these periods reflects the dominant communication infrastructures of their time – radio, television, cable news – through which fear narratives were tailored to the prevailing media logic (Altheide, 2006). Today’s digital media ecosystem – with its fragmented platforms and algorithmic personalisation – marks a new phase in this evolution, yet it operates within a deeply familiar symbolic grammar.

Fear as a political resource has deep historical roots. During the Cold War, Western mass media – particularly television – amplified anti-communist narratives that cast domestic dissent as subversion. Public hearings and loyalty oaths were not only institutional tools but media rituals that dramatised ideological vigilance. This established a media logic in which fear became a routine feature of national identity construction and democratic legitimacy (Altheide, 2006; Thebuwana, 2023). Similar yet still unique styles became visible in the post-9/11 era, when the role of fear was further intensified in democratic societies. The global “war on terror” relied heavily on media saturation, visual dramatisation, and emotional appeals to justify expanded surveillance and securitisation (Lyon, 2014; Thorne & Kouzmin, 2010). In this context, fear was no longer episodic – it became ambient and infrastructural, legitimising new regimes of control through emotional resonance and algorithmic visibility.

While these periods differ in context and medium, they share a structural logic, the affective organisation of public life through fear. This genealogy highlights how symbolic constructions of threat are shaped by – and evolve in response to – the technological and institutional arrangements of political communication. Today’s attention economy inherits and intensifies this legacy through platform logics that algorithmically curate and circulate emotionally charged content. Rather than offering a comprehensive chronology, this chapter identifies key continuities: the symbolic coding of fear, the performative production of threat, and the routinisation of emotional governance. These dynamics form the historical backdrop to the current infrastructure of fear that populist actors exploit in the digital environment.

3. The role of fear in contemporary populist and authoritarian communication

Fear remains a central emotional register in the political communication of contemporary populist and authoritarian actors. What distinguishes the current moment is not simply the presence of fear-inducing discourse but its systematic optimisation through digital platforms, algorithmic feedback loops, and the strategic use of media formats that support engagement, polarisation, and symbolic power. In this setting, fear becomes infrastructural, embedded in communicative routines, aesthetic codes, and interaction formats that are continuously tested, repeated, and rewarded in platform environments (Altheide, 2016; Yeung, 2018; van Dijck et al., 2018; Zuboff, 2019).

Agency and accountability in the infrastructure of fear are distributed, not concentrated in a single actor. Political actors such as parties, leaders, campaign organisations, and aligned media often craft threat narratives strategically because fear can stabilise group boundaries and organise attention in mediatised competition (Altheide, 2016; Altheide & Merkovity, 2022). Platforms need not intend fear as a political objective to be causally implicated. Engagement-oriented ranking, recommendation, and advertising systems can recurrently reward high-arousal signals as a by-product of optimisation incentives and data-driven governance (Yeung, 2018; Zuboff, 2019; van Dijck et al., 2018). Between these poles, an advertising and data ecosystem translates political intent into platform-legible targeting and scalable distribution, while institutional conditions such as electoral rules, oversight capacity, and enforcement gaps shape what is profitable, permissible, and contestable. This account rejects conspiratorial and technologically deterministic explanations and locates fear amplification in the interaction of political strategy, optimisation dynamics, and regulatory conditions.

Populist leaders today rely on a triadic structure of fear politics. It involves the personalisation of threat, the simplification of causality, and repetition across platforms. The personalisation of threat transforms abstract systemic problems (e.g., globalisation, migration, climate change) into emotionally resonant enemies – “invaders,” “traitors,” “criminals,” or “foreign agents.” These figures are rendered morally illegitimate and existentially dangerous, often framed through narratives of cultural decline or demographic replacement. As seen in Orbán’s anti-migration and anti-Soros campaigns, and Trump’s rhetoric around caravans, China, or “radical leftists,” the enemy becomes a symbolic object onto which social anxieties are projected and ritualistically exorcised (Altheide, 2023; Amna, 2022; Bíró-Nagy, 2022; Krzyżanowski, Triandafyllidou, & Wodak, 2018).

The simplification of causality reduces complex socio-political phenomena to digestible, emotionally charged binaries: strong versus weak, nation versus elite, people versus establishment. In doing so, populist actors exploit media logic’s preference for spectacle, conflict, and brevity (Altheide & Snow, 1979). These binaries are designed not to clarify policy but to affirm identity and stoke grievance, operating through what Goffman (1986) would call a symbolic “definition of the situation.”

The third element – repetition – ensures that fear narratives are not episodic but ambient. Across Facebook, YouTube, Telegram, X, TikTok, Truth Social, and television networks, fear-based frames are repeated through images, hashtags, slogans, and memes. These are calibrated to platform-specific logics. “Illegals” in all caps on X, crying children at the border on television, or billboards showing manipulated photographs can then travel across multiple platforms. Algorithmic amplification ensures that such messages reach the already anxious and can further polarise the undecided, contributing to selective exposure and enclaves sometimes described as filter bubbles (Pariser, 2011), even though subsequent research has questioned how widespread and impermeable such bubbles are in practice (Bruns, 2019; Dubois & Blank, 2018; Zuiderveen Borgesius et al., 2016).

Fear rarely works alone in the making of political support. Populist and authoritarian mobilisation also relies on recognition, belonging, and resonance, which can be offered through narratives of national restoration, moral clarity, and cultural protection that promise dignity to selected in-groups. Such appeals often combine symbolic boundary drawing with more tangible incentives and governance strategies that stabilise loyalty over time, particularly in hybrid regimes where media control and institutional power are mutually reinforcing (Moffitt, 2016; Brubaker, 2017; Ádám, 2019; Levitsky & Way, 2010). Fear is not inherently democratically corrosive. Concern can be proportionate to real risks, and public anxiety can be a rational response to long-term, high-impact threats, including environmental and climate-related risks. The analysis, therefore, targets fear that is instrumentally calibrated for political gain and platform circulation, as opposed to fear grounded in evidence-based risk assessment or public-interest warning (Beck, 1992; Slovic, 1987). The infrastructural reproduction of fear does not imply uniform effects on audiences. Interpretations vary across social positions, political identities, and media repertoires, and many users negotiate, contest, or reject fear-based framings rather than absorbing them as intended. Encoding and decoding processes can therefore generate oppositional readings and moments of resistance, even when distribution systems reward high-arousal cues (Hall, 1980).

Importantly, fear functions not only as a strategy of dominance but also as a tool of symbolic legitimacy. In populist discourse, the leader is positioned as the only actor who can “name the threat,” “speak the truth,” and “protect the people.” Fear, therefore, serves a performative function; it affirms the leader’s unique vision and justifies extraordinary measures (Moffitt, 2016). This rhetoric often bypasses intermediary institutions (e.g., parties, press, courts) and appeals directly to a mediatised “people” whose unity is premised not on shared interests but on shared enemies.

Moreover, fear serves a pacifying role in authoritarian communication. In hybrid regimes, state-controlled media use fear to manufacture consent and suppress dissent. Topics like foreign NGOs, LGBTQ+ rights, or “liberal decadence” are framed as destabilising influences, while pro-government actors present themselves as defenders of tradition and stability. The repetition of such themes generates a perception of permanent crisis, making political pluralism appear dangerous and state control seem necessary (Krzyżanowski et al., 2018; Levitsky & Way, 2010). In this environment, fear becomes an instrument of affective governance – a regime of power that shapes emotions as much as institutions. Citizens are not only mobilised or demobilised, but also trained to feel in particular ways, e.g., pride in the nation, disgust toward outsiders, and anxiety about the future. These emotions are neither spontaneous nor irrational; they are cultivated, patterned, and encoded in the symbolic performances of modern politics.

3.1. Trump and the performance of threat

Donald Trump’s political communication offers a useful illustration of how fear, media logic, and attention-based politics can be assembled into a repeatable mode of platform-facing political performance. The point is not to treat Trump as an exhaustive case study or a uniquely deviant actor, but to use a highly visible communicative style to clarify how threat can be staged, circulated, and stabilised across multiple media venues as a routine that is continuously reinforced by attention competition. In this sense, the example supports the article’s broader claim that fear in platform environments often functions less as a discrete message than as an organising principle that shapes what becomes salient, how it becomes memorable, and how it remains available for repetition (Altheide, 2023; Merkovity, 2017). The focus is on the period from 2021 to early 2025, spanning post-presidential mobilisation, the 2024 campaign, and the opening phase of Trump’s second presidency, which began on 20 January 2025. This period is analytically valuable because it foregrounds continuity across institutional positions and across platform conditions. It highlights how a politics of danger can be sustained as a public-facing performance even when communicative channels, moderation regimes, and distribution opportunities are in flux. Within this configuration, fear rarely functions as a policy argument in the narrow sense. It operates as a performative resource that dramatises danger and converts that dramatisation into a promise of protection. This rhythm of threat and reassurance aligns with a media logic that privileges affect, conflict, and repetition, while attention-based politics rewards actors who can reliably generate salience through symbolic resonance, not deliberative merit. (Altheide & Merkovity, 2022).

A Goffmanian lens helps keep this mechanism concrete. The frontstage is the constant stream of public performances that signal vigilance, transgression, and control. The backstage is the less visible work of maintaining coherence across venues and formats, including content packaging, selective amplification, surrogate messengers, and targeting practices that translate the same cues into platform-ready units. The result is not simply a rhetorical style, but a routinised communicative arrangement that can be reproduced across platforms and media outlets (Goffman, 1959). Trump’s earlier Twitter practice made this dynamic legible as a continuous feed of brief, emotionally charged messages that privileged antagonism and simplification (Luo et al., 2021). In the post-2021 environment, that performative stream persisted across a broader ecology that includes alt-tech and proprietary channels. Empirical work on Trump’s use of both mainstream and alt-tech social media suggests that attention generation is not tied to any single platform, but to a cross-platform capacity to trigger user engagement and related news attention (Zhang et al., 2025). This cross-platform portability is precisely what makes threat performance infrastructural rather than episodic.

Fear is central in the scripts that map social anxiety onto moral binaries and personified enemies. Labels such as “Chinese virus” exemplify how naming practices can function as affective shortcuts that assign blame, intensify stigma, and stabilise an us and them boundary with minimal informational content (Budhwani & Sun, 2020; Luo et al., 2021). The same logic operates through personalised denunciation and delegitimising epithets that compress political conflict into memorable cues. Such tactics have been documented in Trump’s use of social media to attack opponents, organise supporters, and frame adversaries as threats instead of interlocutors (Pelled et al., 2018).

The platform governance disruptions of 2021 are relevant to an infrastructure argument. Trump’s removal from Twitter in January 2021 did not end fear-based mobilisation, but it reconfigured the channels through which it circulated. Evidence on the deletion of Trump’s account indicates measurable changes in the behaviour of his followers on Twitter, including a reduction in toxicity relative to a comparison baseline, which underlines how platform interventions can reshape the communicative environment without eliminating the underlying political demand for outrage and threat cues (Müller & Schwarz, 2023). However, fear is not the only offer. Recognition and resonance for groups and interests matter for base-building, especially in a status-saturated conflict. Recent work on the symbolic politics of status in the MAGA movement highlights how grievance and boundary drawing can coexist with pride, belonging, and public affirmation. In this sense, fear works alongside a promise that the audience will be seen, defended, and restored to a valued position, which helps explain why reassurance can remain credible even when threat narratives become exaggerated or visibly unstable (Koenig & Mendelberg, 2025). The 2024 campaign cycle provides salient examples of such amplified claims being circulated and corrected while still functioning as attention devices within a hybrid media environment (Ulmer, 2024). Taken together, Trump’s communicative pattern is best treated as an illustration, not a stand-alone case study. The point is not that fear alone drives support, but that fear, reassurance, and recognition can be organised into repeatable routines that fit platform metrics, travel across media venues, and stabilise political identity under conditions of attention competition (Altheide, 2023; Merkovity, 2017; Zhang et al., 2025).

3.2. Orbán and the mediatisation of national anxiety

Viktor Orbán’s political communication illustrates how fear can be routinised when threat narratives align with a dense media infrastructure and a long-term governing strategy. The aim is not to offer a comprehensive account of Hungarian politics, but to show how the staging of danger becomes durable when it is reproduced across state-aligned media, professionalised digital campaigning, and platform-facing formats. In this setting, fear operates less as a discrete message than as a repeatable meaning-making routine that simplifies political conflict and stabilises moral boundaries by normalising particular ways of naming threats and attributing blame (Krzyżanowski, 2020). The routine simultaneously supports a protective role for the governing actor, channelling public uncertainty into reassurance and loyalty, while reducing space for deliberation over competing policy alternatives in the public sphere (Ádám, 2019). A key difference from the Trump illustration is the degree of institutional embedding. Since 2010, Orbán’s governing coalition has shaped a media environment in which distribution capacity and regulatory power interact with market mechanisms. Research on state advertising in Hungary shows how public resources can reshape the media market by rewarding aligned outlets and disadvantaging critical ones, which affects editorial incentives without requiring direct content control in every instance (Bátorfy & Urbán, 2020). Recent work on the Orbán regime’s media system further clarifies how anti-pluralist transformation persists through institutional change, market distortion, and the consolidation of discursive dominance (Benedek, 2024). This political economy matters for an infrastructure argument because fear-oriented formats gain durability when they are repeatedly carried by organisations that are structurally incentivised to circulate the same interpretive frames. The result is not a uniform public sphere, but a patterned information environment in which narratives of threat are easier to scale, easier to repeat, and harder to contest at comparable levels of reach (Polyák et al., 2022; Urbán et al., 2023).

Within that environment, fear has operated through a sequence of adaptable master frames, not a single fixed script. The migration mobilisation after 2015 exemplified how a high-salience topic can be turned into a moralised boundary between a protected national community and an externalised threat, a pattern consistent with analyses of civilisational populism in Europe (Bíró-Nagy, 2022; Brubaker, 2017). These frames do more than describe events. They define the situation by tying sovereignty, culture, and security together in a way that remains communicatively reusable across channels and formats. The salient feature is less the novelty of the rhetoric than its infrastructural rendering through repetition, synchronisation, and the distributional advantages of a state-aligned media ecology. The same infrastructure can later accommodate different content domains while preserving the same protective role structure, which is why the fear repertoire can shift while the governing posture remains stable (Krzyżanowski, 2020; Polyák et al., 2022). In practice, this frame is packaged into short, portable cues that present “peace” as everyday security and “war” as externally driven escalation (Grygiel, 2023; Madlovics & Magyar, 2023).

From 2022 onward, the Russia–Ukraine war created a further opportunity to deepen the logic of fear paired with reassurance. In government-aligned communication, the core distinction has often been articulated as peace versus war, with political opponents and external actors positioned as agents of escalation, while the government is staged as the guarantor of national safety and everyday life. This configuration is analytically important because it shows how fear is not only mobilising. It can also be pacifying. It can cultivate caution, fatigue, and a preference for stability, while simultaneously reaffirming loyalty to the protector role. Scholarship on Hungarian propaganda language and on regime strategy during the war underlines how the peace frame can operate as a political resource in an illiberal context (Grygiel, 2023; Madlovics & Magyar, 2023).

Digital platforms amplify this dynamic not simply by hosting content, but by rewarding communication that is brief, visual, repetitive, and emotionally legible. Evidence from Hungarian campaign communication on Facebook shows that topic choice and issue positioning are linked to user engagement, which helps explain why simplified, high-salience cues are strategically attractive in competitive visibility environments (Bene, 2021). Orbán’s communication has increasingly relied on curated videos, simplified slogans, and personalised addresses that translate complex geopolitical and cultural conflicts into portable cues suitable for algorithmically mediated circulation (Urbán et al., 2023). These cues can travel between social media, online news, and television, reinforcing a sense of ambient crisis while maintaining an accompanying promise of order and protection. The outcome is consistent with the article’s broader claim that the infrastructure of fear is produced through interactions among political strategy, media organisation, and platform optimisation incentives rather than by a single source of intent (Altheide, 2016; van Dijck et al., 2018; Yeung, 2018).

Crucially, this mobilisation cannot be reduced to fear alone. Orbán’s political offer also includes recognition and resonance for selected in-groups through narratives of national restoration, moral clarity, and cultural protection. Such appeals can be intensified by campaigns that define social belonging through conflict over family, education, and sexuality, thereby reinforcing identity while sharpening out-group boundaries (Gera, 2023). In hybrid regimes, this symbolic work often coexists with selective governance strategies and material incentives that stabilise loyalty over time, which is one reason the emotional architecture remains credible even when particular threat claims shift from one topic to another (Ádám, 2019; Levitsky & Way, 2010). The Orbán illustration, therefore, supports the argument that fear becomes infrastructural when it is repeatedly coupled with reassurance and recognition, and when institutional and platform conditions facilitate the reproduction of that coupling at scale.

4. From performance to governance: fear as a mode of rule

The preceding chapters have traced the construction and implementation of fear in political communication from Cold War propaganda to post-9/11 securitisation and twenty-first-century populist social media strategies. What emerges from this historical and comparative lens is not simply a collection of fear-inducing messages but a deeper transformation; notably, fear has evolved from an episodic campaign tactic into a systematic mode of governance. In the era of attention-based politics, fear is no longer marginal or manipulative – it is infrastructural, performative, and routinised. This shift can be understood along three interlinked dimensions: symbolic, technological, and institutional.

First, on the symbolic level, fear functions as an interpretive frame that simplifies complex realities and structures political perception. Goffman’s (1986) dramaturgical theory suggests that political leaders increasingly perform fear in staged contexts – such as press conferences, social media posts, and national consultations – where emotional resonance takes precedence over factual consistency. These performances define not only who the “enemy” is, but also who belongs, who is at risk, and who can offer protection. The populist style relies on the continual staging of crisis (Moffitt, 2016). Fear, therefore, is not a consequence of political communication, but it is a very condition of possibility.

Second, the technological dimension of this transformation is rooted in the logic of contemporary media systems. As shown in earlier chapters, the media logic of affective virality, brevity, and visual salience prioritises emotionally charged content. In such an ecosystem, fear is rewarded algorithmically. Messages that provoke outrage, disgust, or moral panic are more likely to be amplified, creating an attention economy in which fear-based communication becomes a rational strategy (Bennett & Livingston, 2018; Yeung, 2018; Zuboff, 2019). This dynamic is not limited to politicians, influencers, media outlets, and partisan actors, all of whom operate within this competitive symbolic environment, further rooting fear as a dominant emotional currency.

Third, institutionally, fear has become normalised as a rationale for illiberal governance. In hybrid regimes such as Hungary, and increasingly even in established democracies, fear narratives legitimise emergency powers, surveillance laws, border closures, and the suppression of civil society. These practices contribute to the erosion of liberal democratic norms while preserving a façade of legitimacy through manipulated public discourse (Krzyżanowski, 2020; Levitsky & Way, 2010). Fear becomes what Michel Foucault (2006) might call a technology of power, not imposed from above, but circulating through symbolic codes, bureaucratic instruments, and participatory rituals (e.g., national consultations).

This synthesis also invites a theoretical recalibration. Traditional models of political communication often treat emotions – especially fear – as secondary to rational discourse. Yet the empirical cases suggest otherwise. In attention-based politics, fear operates as a central organising principle that structures visibility, legitimacy, and political action. The dichotomy between “information-based” and “attention-based” democracy (Brawner, 2015) no longer suffices. What emerges is a redefinition of political authority itself, where governing means managing attention, and managing attention increasingly means mobilising fear.

Importantly, fear as governance is not uniform across contexts. It adapts to national histories, institutional legacies, and media infrastructures. In the United States, Trump’s “gonzo” style exemplified improvisational and disruptive fear performance; in Hungary, Orbán’s approach reflects long-term institutional embedding and message discipline. Nevertheless, both rely on shared structural conditions: media saturation, symbolic polarisation, and weakened intermediaries.

In conclusion, fear in contemporary platformised politics should be reclassified from a strategic communication technique to a condition of governance itself. The reason for this lies not only in rhetoric and style but in the very affordances, metrics, and distribution logics of digital infrastructures. Governing political communication now means governing affective flows, especially fear. As such, internet policy and platform regulation must be attuned not just to information disorder, but to affective disorder, the systemic privileging of emotionally corrosive and democratically destabilising content. This requires structure-aware, emotionally literate governance frameworks.

5. Regulating fear as infrastructure: policy challenges in the platform age

The preceding analysis has shown how fear operates not only as rhetoric but also as an infrastructural feature of platformised political communication, shaped by design choices, ranking systems, and advertising architectures. A policy response, therefore, benefits from shifting attention from individual items of content toward the conditions of circulation that make fear-based formats durable and repeatedly rewarding. The Digital Services Act and the European Media Freedom Act offer entry points for such a shift. Still, their effectiveness depends on whether systemic emotional amplification is treated as a governance problem rather than a by-product of online speech (Regulation 2022/2065, 2022; Regulation 2024/1083, 2024).

5.1. Platform governance and algorithmic amplification

For platforms designated as VLOPs and for authorities responsible for DSA enforcement, a key problem concerns predictable amplification patterns that recurrently reward high-arousal political formats, including fear-laden cues. Engagement-oriented ranking, recommendation, and advertising systems can systematically prioritise high-arousal signals because such cues tend to increase attention and time spent in the service environment (Bhandari & Bimo, 2022; Lustig et al., 2016; Yeung, 2018; Zuboff, 2019). A structure-aware approach can therefore treat fear amplification as a systemic risk that merits assessment and mitigation under the DSA’s risk management logic (Regulation 2022/2065, 2022).

Three intervention points follow. First, independent auditors commissioned under the DSA can test whether recommender and ranking systems systematically deliver disproportionate reach to fear-inducing political formats, with particular attention to repeated threat narratives and coordinated distribution. Second, platforms designated as VLOPs can strengthen transparency by disclosing high-level parameters and institutional procedures that shape political visibility, including risk assessments and mitigation decisions. Third, regulators can expand researchers’ access to enable reproducible examination of the relationship among emotional signalling, targeting, and reach, instead of relying on inferences from limited data traces.

Each intervention comes with trade-offs that should be acknowledged explicitly. Audit regimes can be gamed if disclosure is overly granular, and transparency can clash with security and privacy constraints. Researcher access must be designed to prevent re-identification and to avoid reproducing data dominance by a small set of institutions. These constraints support a governance design that prioritises independent oversight capacity and clear procedural standards over unrestricted disclosure.

5.2. Mediated emotional governance and public deliberation

For EU institutions and national media regulators involved in implementing the EMFA and safeguarding media pluralism, a key problem concerns the quality of mediated deliberation in affectively polarised information environments. When citizens primarily encounter politics through repeated symbolic cues of invasion, decay, or betrayal, pluralistic debate becomes more challenging to sustain, and political opponents are more readily framed as existential threats. This dynamic is intensified where state-aligned media ecosystems synchronise narratives with platform distribution, shifting fear from a situational response into a durable interpretive environment.

The EMFA offers a relevant policy framework because it targets structural conditions for media pluralism and editorial independence. Its contribution to democratic resilience can be strengthened by recognising that pluralism is not only a matter of ownership and professional standards but also of emotionally sustainable information environments (Regulation 2024/1083, 2024). In practice, this can support public-interest media infrastructures that privilege explanation, verification, and contextualisation over affective escalation, while broadening civil society participation in defining procedural standards for political advertising and amplification practices. Public-interest funding and regulatory safeguards can prioritise editorial independence and transparency obligations, thereby reducing political capture and fostering emotionally sustainable information environments. For public-service and independent media organisations, professional and organisational standards can strengthen slow journalism formats that reward context, verification, and contestation rather than high-arousal polarisation. For civil society organisations and watchdogs, participatory mechanisms can help define and monitor procedural standards without adjudicating political viewpoints.

Trade-offs remain central. For regulators and courts, measures intended to reduce affective manipulation can drift into content policing when their scope is poorly defined and when enforcement targets viewpoints instead of distribution practices. A focus on institutional conditions and procedural accountability reduces this risk by prioritising distribution and transparency rules over the adjudication of political positions.

5.3. Democratic resilience beyond regulation

For education systems, public institutions, and civil society organisations tasked with strengthening democratic resilience, a key problem concerns how to reduce susceptibility to fear amplification without sliding into content policing or moralised gatekeeping. A resilience agenda, therefore, benefits from combining affective literacy with platform literacy and evidence-oriented reasoning. Affective literacy can be defined as the ability to recognise, contextualise, and reflect on political emotions, including fear, outrage, and disgust, while resisting pressured sharing and reactive judgement. Platform literacy can add an understanding of how ranking, recommendation, and advertising systems shape what becomes visible, salient, and socially legible. Evidence-oriented reasoning can keep interpretive flexibility compatible with standards of verification and argument, without collapsing scepticism into cynicism.

Concrete implementation can be differentiated by level and audience. Many media and civic literacy initiatives already pursue these goals in robust ways. Yet, gaps remain in how training addresses platform-specific incentives, cross-platform amplification, and the practical management of high-arousal communication in everyday settings. For schools and teachers, civic education can integrate training in identifying emotional cues, understanding platform incentives, and practising slow judgment under uncertainty, supported by structured exercises in verification and constructive disagreement. For adult education providers and public institutions, training can focus on recognising recurrent manipulation patterns, interpreting risk claims, and responding to high-arousal content in ways that avoid reactive sharing and escalation. For civil society organisations, programmes can support community-rooted moderation practices and deliberative formats that reward explanation and sustained engagement, alongside facilitation methods that reduce incentives for performative outrage.

Funding models matter because informational resilience depends on whether alternative infrastructures can compete with attention-optimised systems. For public funders and philanthropic organisations, public-interest funding, local and community media support, and independent investigative journalism funds can counterbalance the economic advantage of engagement-maximising distribution by building institutions whose performance metrics prioritise reliability and civic value rather than viral reach. Such models clarify whose power is countered and by whom. Public, civic, and independent media capacities can counter platform-centred attention extraction and polarising political advertising by privileging accountability and public explanation.

Conclusion

If fear is now infrastructural – coded into the platforms we use, the messages we see, and the rituals of democratic life – then governing fear must also become infrastructural. Europe’s regulatory efforts, while increasingly ambitious, must advance from content-centric to structure-aware approaches that foreground the emotional and symbolic dimensions of digital political life. Only then can the promise of democratic communication be reclaimed from its mediatised anxieties.

Future research and regulatory efforts must also engage more seriously with the emotional labour demanded of citizens within digitally mediatised democracies. If fear is not only consumed but also performed and shared by users, then fostering digitally resilient publics requires more than rational literacy; it demands the repair of affective infrastructure. Most importantly, research should explore how platform affordances differentially mediate fear across demographics, particularly among younger users who are socialised in algorithmically affective environments.