The European Way To Counter Disinformation Make Europe Resilient

The Hanns Seidel Foundation, in cooperation with the Center for Conflict Prevention and Early Warning, convened a high-level round table in Bucharest on September 22–23, 2025. The event gathered experts, policymakers, diplomats, academics, and analysts from across Europe to address one of the most pressing challenges of our time: countering disinformation and strengthening Europe’s resilience. The round table was structured around three key thematic panels: The event was opened by Jan Dresel, Director of the Hanns Seidel Foundation’s project Peace and Democracy in Eastern Europe, and Prof. Dr. Iulian Chifu, President of the Center for Conflict Prevention and Early Warning and Senior Research Fellow of INIS (Institute for National and International Security).

Prof. Dr. Chifu emphasized that disinformation not only undermines democratic institutions but also erodes trust between citizens and governments. His intervention framed the round table by stressing the need for evidence-based counter-narratives and stronger European cooperation. Prof. Dr.

Chifu underlined that ideological narratives are strategically designed to weaken Europe’s cohesion by amplifying divisions between East and West, democracy and authoritarianism. He highlighted the necessity of building resilience through education, strategic communication, and societal awareness. Prof. Dr. Darko Trifunović, Director of the Institute for National and International Security (INIS) in Belgrade and Senior Research Fellow, delivered a key intervention. He drew attention to the vulnerabilities of states bordering Russia to hybrid threats and particularly to Russia’s projection of kinetic energy toward Ukraine as the most visible manifestation of hybrid warfare.

Supporting independent media organisations, as well as public service news media, is part of a new EU-wide strategy. Ireland has backed another move towards preparing for threats against European democracy from disinformation campaigns, sabotage of critical infrastructure, and war. All but one of the 27 EU cultural ministers in Brussels have supported the approval of EU Council policy regarding access to “reliable news” as part of its so-called European Democracy Shield. They included media minister Patrick O’Donovan, who represented Ireland at the meeting. The shield initiative is part of the EU’s package of measures to, among other things, integrate “preparedness and resilience” into co-operation between member states and with organisations like Nato in the face of growing... Amid escalating and increasingly sophisticated disinformation and FIMI campaigns, the challenge goes well beyond hostile states.

Platform policy rollbacks and political shifts in several countries are adding new hurdles; at the same time, some actors are trying to reframe counter-disinformation work as “censorship” and even urging non-compliance with European laws... Together, these dynamics are increasing the pressure on the counter-disinformation community. EU DisinfoLab documents these emerging risks across Europe—with a close look at Germany—in a new report prepared for the Friedrich Nauman Foundation. The fight against information manipulation and related distortions stands at a contradictory juncture. On the one hand, awareness has never been higher as people, political actors, and decision-makers increasingly recognise the threat, frequently refer to it in public interventions, and express the intention to act. On the other hand, the threats are multiplying.

Several drivers fuel the escalation of disinformation, Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI), and other deceptive practices: intensifying geopolitical tensions and armed conflicts, the rapid digitalisation of critical infrastructures, and accelerating technological development –... Within this context, information manipulation takes the form of orchestrated disinformation campaigns, broader FIMI strategies, propaganda, and even financially motivated scams. These practices often overlap, blurring the boundaries between political, economic, and criminal motivations. At the same time, growing access to advanced technologies – particularly artificial intelligence – has widened the pool of actors capable of exploiting such tools for malicious purposes. Crucially, the challenge is no longer external to the EU. The counter-disinformation community increasingly operates in a hostile political and institutional environment.

A recent example came during Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s 2025 State of the Union address, when she was interrupted by dissenting shouts as she announced the creation of the European Centre for... Parliament President Roberta Metsola warned MEP Christine Anderson (AfD) that she would be removed from the chamber if she continued interrupting proceedings. 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. You have full access to this open access article A Correction to this article was published on 31 May 2025 This article addresses the critical issue of societal resilience in the face of disinformation, particularly in highly digitized democratic societies. Recognizing the escalating impact of disinformation as a significant threat to societal security, the study conducts a scoping review of the literature from 2018 to 2022 to explore the current understanding and approaches to...

The core contribution of the article is the development of a preliminary typological framework that addresses key elements and issue areas relevant to societal resilience to disinformation. This framework spans multiple dimensions, including legal/regulatory, educational, political/governance, psychological/social-psychological, and technological domains. By synthesizing existing knowledge and filling identified gaps, the framework aims to serve as a foundational tool for empirical analyses and the enhancement of resilience strategies. One of the innovative aspects of the proposed framework is its potential to be transformed into a computable and customizable tool. This tool would measure the maturity level of various countermeasures against disinformation, thereby providing a practical methodology for planning and implementing effective democratic responses to disinformation. The article emphasizes the importance of this framework as both a conceptual and practical guide.

It offers valuable insights for a wide range of civil society actors, including policymakers, educators, and technologists, in their efforts to protect information integrity and bolster societal resilience. By laying the groundwork for a more comprehensive understanding of societal resilience to disinformation, the article contributes to the broader discourse on information protection and provides actionable guidance for addressing the evolving challenges posed... Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript. In highly digitized democratic societies, there are growing concerns about the impact of disinformation. European countries have faced significant challenges related to disinformation issues, such as elections, fundamental democratic values, pandemics, and migration, among others. This has prompted the European Commission (2018a) to outline four pillars in its action plan on tackling online disinformation.

These include improving institutional capabilities, fostering coordinated responses, engaging the private sector, and raising awareness. The Digital Services Act (European Union 2022) has binding regulatory powers to address large social media platforms, for instance, if they are deemed to be promoting and disseminating disinformation. However, the effectiveness of these measures remains uncertain. The Global Risks Report 2024 by the World Economic Forum (2024) clearly illustrates this, ranking disinformation as the most severe short-term (2-year) global risk and placing societal polarization in third place – with both... Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume 10, Article number: 657 (2023) Cite this article The COVID-19 health crisis and the invasion of Ukraine have placed disinformation in the focus of European policies.

Our aim is to analyze the emerging European policy on counter-disinformation practices and regulations. To do this, we examine developing European Union (EU) strategy, against different forms of fake news, from a multidisciplinary approach that combines Journalism and Geopolitics. Our methodology is based on the critical analysis of documents generated by the EU on disinformation from 2018 to 2022, including reports, communications, statements and other legislative texts. Our findings suggest that the EU’s policy against disinformation is based on two opposing logics that coexist and compete. The first is securitization, which understands this problem as a threat to democracy that legitimizes ‘exceptional decision-making’ from a hard power perspective. The second is based on the self-regulation and voluntarism of digital platforms with a clear orientation towards soft law and minimal intervention.

The recent adoption of the Digital Services Act and the stronger regulation of online platforms do not replace this logic, since this legislation adopts a “co-regulatory framework”. The coexistence of these two logics generates internal contradictions and dissonance that can determine the future of European policies on this important topic and its chances of success. Following Russia’s aggression against Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the European Union (EU) adopted a series of sanctions aimed at reducing Russia’s ability to wage war. Whereas most were of an economic nature, measures suspending the airing in the EU of Russian government-controlled broadcasters, such as RT and Sputnik, were among the first EU reactions to the invasion. The rationale for these sanctions is that these broadcasters are sources of disinformation that are weaponized by the Kremlin: “Systematic information manipulation and disinformation by the Kremlin is applied as an operational tool in... It is also a significant and direct threat to the Union’s public order and security.” (European Commission 2022) In doing so the EU took a further step, at least since the occupation of Crimea...

Only one year earlier, in December 2020, the Commission took action on a different aspect of disinformation, the role of social media platforms in the spread and circulation of fake news, by including it... This represented a real innovation, as previously the EU had expected platforms to comply on a voluntary basis. The differences between these two regulatory elements show significant evolutions in the consideration of disinformation by the EU. Firstly, despite the incomplete transnationalization of public spheres (Rivas-de-Roca and García-Gordillo 2022), the EU sees disinformation as a multifaceted transnational phenomenon. Its policy response has in different moments addressed classical international concerns –the so called weaponization of disinformation in asymmetric conflicts (Szostek 2020)– globalization asymmetries –with transnational companies potentially exploiting regulatory asymmetries and differences between... Secondly, disinformation is currently seen as a matter for regulatory intervention by the public sector, rather than an example of poor information supply that will be solved by the news market.

As such, disinformation has experienced different ‘international response regimes’, going from the organization of international coalitions of professionals to counteract fake news, to its consideration as a security threat in the context of hybrid... The consideration of such responses is fertile ground for analysis, since the analyses of responses adopted by international actors is as instructive as the areas in which action does not take place. The combination of these approaches allows for analysis of the emerging international regime of the fight against disinformation.

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