Democracy Hacked: Political Turmoil and Information Warfare in the Digital Age

Martin Moore — founder and director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at King's College London — examines how digital technology and the information environment have together destabilised democratic systems. The book traces the convergence of micro-targeted political advertising, data-driven voter manipulation, social media-enabled disinformation, and the collapse of traditional media gatekeeping into a comprehensive threat to democratic self-governance.

Democracy Hacked is distinguished from similar accounts by its focus on the structural rather than the episodic: Moore is not primarily interested in the 2016 elections as specific events, but in the transformation of the information environment that made those events possible and that continues to create conditions for ongoing democratic disruption. His analysis of the platform economy — the ways in which the business models of Google and Facebook are structurally incompatible with the information conditions that democracy requires — is among the most rigorous available. For practitioners advising clients on the relationship between platform governance and democratic resilience, this book provides essential analytical grounding.