Spillover

function

Spillover refers to the unintentional or secondary spread of regime narratives or tactics through external media, actors, or channels, extending influence without direct coordination or strategic planning.

Author

Affiliation

E. Rosalie Li

Information Epidemiology Lab

Published

February 17, 2026

Spillover captures the secondary and often unintentional diffusion of regime narratives or tactics. This includes foreign journalists citing state media, content carried over through wire services, and alignment by external actors with compatible goals. Sometimes, these are cases of uncoordinated citation or inadvertent amplification. Sometimes, they are tolerated or even welcomed by state actors. However, they lack the direct command or strategic orchestration seen in projection or obfuscation. Instead, spillover extends the regime’s influence footprint without additional cost.

Title	Description
Algorithmic Propagation	Algorithms amplify manipulated content based on engagement metrics rather than credibility, allowing state actors to weaponize coordinated disinformation campaigns that spread as if organic through platforms’ recommendation systems.
Background Noise	Persistent low-level repetition of regime-aligned messages across multiple channels creates ambient epistemic pollution that normalizes falsehoods, weakens skepticism, and degrades public trust in information environments long after individual influence operations end.
Elevated Agitation	Elevated agitation is the deliberate amplification of authentic social tensions through coordinated information operations to escalate divisive issues beyond organic intensity, eroding social cohesion and democratic deliberation through emotional contagion that persists independently of triggering events.
Information Decay	Repeated exposure to disinformation and institutional distrust cumulatively erodes societies’ shared epistemic foundations, fragmenting populations into incompatible interpretive communities incapable of collective sense-making and democratic governance.
Institutional Relay	State actors embed policy preferences within international institutions to acquire institutional legitimacy and obscure their authorship, allowing their preferred outcomes to be adopted globally as neutral technical standards rather than state directives.
Organic Alignment	Organic alignment occurs when domestic actors independently adopt and advocate for positions that coincide with foreign state interests without coordination or payment, creating credible, self-sustaining advocacy that is more resilient and difficult to counter than directed influence because it emerges from genuine domestic conviction.
Semantic Contagion	Semantic contagion is the process by which linguistic frames and conceptual terminology—whether organically or through influence operations—spread across ideological boundaries, acquire new political meanings in different contexts, and become embedded in a society’s analytical vocabulary in ways that persistently reshape how populations understand political reality.
Unwitting Engagement	Unwitting engagement is a state-directed influence operation that recruits authentic individuals and organizations to advance foreign strategic objectives without their awareness, exploiting their genuine credibility and social networks to mask orchestration and transform inauthentic messaging into perceived consensus.

FIMI Taxonomy by Information Epidemiology Lab.

Citation

BibTeX citation:

@article{li2026,
  author = {Li, E. Rosalie},
  title = {Spillover},
  date = {2026-02-17},
  url = {https://fimi.infoepi.org/function/spillover.html},
  langid = {en}
}

For attribution, please cite this work as:

Li, E. Rosalie. 2026. “Spillover,” February. https://fimi.infoepi.org/function/spillover.html.