TIRANA, July 27 /ATA/- By Maela Marini/ Prime Minister Edi Rama on Monday warned about the growing threat of information manipulation through artificial intelligence and foreign interference, calling it one of the key challenges facing nations today.
Addressing the conference “Countering Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference: Albania and the Enlargement Context” in Tirana, Rama said the nature of national security has undergone a fundamental transformation in the current era.
At first glance, this conference is about algorithms, digital platforms and information ecosystems. I believe it is about something much more fundamental we are obliged to deal with when we address these topics. Because it is about democracy, it is about public trust and ultimately, it is about whether free societies possess the strategic clarity to defend the open spaces they built.
For centuries and millennia, nations defended their sovereignty, people defended their sovereignty, tribes defended their sovereignty by guarding physical borders. Today, we must defend something invisible, yet every bit as vital. The space where our citizens form opinions, exercise judgments and make their own free choices. The geography of national security has fundamentally changed.
Power is no longer measured solely by the size of armies or the reach of traditional military hardware. And this is something I obsessively go back to in every conversation we have with our allies and partners when it comes to defense spending, when it comes to ramping up our military, when it comes to making our armies stronger by the day. Because power is increasingly measured also by something else: the ability to alter perception, weaponize societal divisions and erode trust in democratic institutions. And history has taught us something very clear about what we have to deal with today.
More than 3,000 years ago, not far from here, where we met today, Homer told the story of Troy. Troy did not fall, because it had a weak army. Troy did not fall because its walls were too weak to withstand the siege. Troy did not fall because it has no border security. It fell because the threat entered disguised as something harmless.
The Trojan horse, and this is the name of a virus, remains history’s ultimate lesson. The greatest danger is rarely the one storming your gates. It is more the one invited inside because it looks harmless. It is the one we praise in the name of freedom of opinion. It is the one we protect in the name of freedom of speech. It is the one that we are always reluctant to deal with properly even when it shows its true colors. Because for us it is a matter of democracy and a matter of freedom. And so, we have come to a moment when we have completely lost it by accepting freedom of reach as an extension of the freedom of speech.
And foreign information manipulation and interference never arrive wearing a uniform. It arrives as a daily content, as outrage, as a viral trend, as a deepfake video of a celebrity or a politician, as a link forwarded in WhatsApp group by our uncle, who genuinely believes he’s sharing some disturbing truth. It speaks our native language; it exploits our anxieties and targets exactly our open debates. And that is precisely why it is so effective and why we look so doomed to fail in front of it. Today manipulation travels at the speed of an algorithm powered by artificial intelligence and deployed at big scale.
Bottom line is you no longer need an army to destabilize a country. And look at what is happening across Europe today. Attacks do not necessarily begin with anyone crossing physical borders. They begin with silent strikes against data, digital infrastructure, public perception, when we are awake, when we are asleep.
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