Teaching Resilience To Disinformation A National And European Pe

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Dec 5, 2025, 10:24 PM

teaching resilience to disinformation a national and european pe

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume 11, Article number: 101 (2024) Cite this article 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... Such assessments are central, particularly to understanding citizens’ information needs in key democratic events such as elections. Defined as purposely created false content, disinformation has been one of the most urgent political problems worldwide in the past decade. The rapid spread of disinformation that has been made possible by fast-developing technologies has prompted countries to react and address this challenge, with varied levels of success.

Some strategies to combat disinformation have achieved more impact than others, yet there is no silver bullet in effectively wringing disinformation out of the communication ecosystem. The local context, a combination of factors including the health of the media system, the level of education, the quality of political debate, and the type of access to information, plays a major role... Success in staving off the effects of disinformation is affected to a large extent by information resilience defined as a society’s ability to (1) secure trustworthy societal systems and structures, (2) support related knowledge... At the center of this concept of information resilience is a healthy level of trust (Staender and Humprecht, 2022). Public Education Forum a NAFO Initiative Imagine this: A parent scrolling through social media comes across a post claiming that a new law will force children to receive an experimental vaccine without parental consent.

Outraged, they share the post. It spreads like wildfire, stoking fear and anger—except, the claim is completely false. This is how disinformation operates, influencing elections, public health, and trust in democratic institutions. Disinformation isn’t just a problem for politicians and journalists. Head of National Institute for Intelligence Studies at "Mihai Viteazul" National Intelligence Academy The tension created between protecting democratic societies from external manipulation while preserving open discourse and critical inquiry that are fundamental to democratic systems has become more of a global concern throughout this past decade.

A number of questions arise from here: How can educational interventions address the psychological vulnerabilities that make individuals susceptible to disinformation? What specific skills and literacies should be integrated into educational programs to build proactive defenses against information manipulation? How can education systems balance prebunking approaches with maintaining democratic values while countering foreign information warfare? If ways to build a resilient society against disinformation have been a topic of investigation in your research or practice, you might want to check an article I recently published in International Journal of... One after the others, all the articles of the special édition of thé IJICI on the topic "Towards an European strategic Intel. Culture" , are published !

Looking forward the complete edition in June ! The main problem here is to define disinformation and how to distinguish it from information. I may suggest that the former is not supported by evidence, while the latter is. But the what is evidence? Facts? Then any of us will hardly be able to observe facts first hand.

Therefore in most cases with evidence we mean reported facts, which can be hardly be considered evident. So we all go back to the main issue about what is observable AND measurable … what is neither is not evidence Member of the Advisory Council - European Digital Media Observatory Did you know that you can annotate your document and share your annotations?

Teaching Resilience To Disinformation A National And European Pe

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