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Beyond online disinformation : assessing national information resilience in four European countries
Title / Series / Name
Publication Volume
Publication Issue
Pages
Editors
Keywords
Disinformation
Social media
HM Sociology
General Social Sciences
General Psychology
Social media
HM Sociology
General Social Sciences
General Psychology
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/27414
Abstract
As social media is a key conduit for the distribution of disinformation, much of the literature on disinformation in elections has been focused on the internet and global social media platforms. Literature on societal and media trust has also grown in recent years. Yet, disinformation is not limited to global platforms or the internet, traditional media outlets in many European countries act as vehicles of disinformation often under the direction of the government. Moreover, the connection between trust and resilience to disinformation has been less discussed. This article is aimed at tackling the question of what makes a country vulnerable to or resilient against online disinformation. It argues that a society’s information resilience can be viewed as a combination of structural characteristics, features of its knowledge-distribution institutions including its media system, and the activities and capabilities of its citizens. The article makes this argument by describing these dimensions in four European case countries, based on comparable statistics and document analyses. The results indicate that European-wide strategies do not uniformly strengthen national resilience against disinformation and that anti-disinformation strategies need to be anchored in targeted assessments of the state of information resilience at the national level to be more effective. Such assessments are central, particularly to understanding citizens’ information needs in key democratic events such as elections.
Topic
Publisher
Place of Publication
Type
Journal article
Date
2024-01-13
Language
ISBN
Identifiers
10.1057/s41599-024-02605-5