Towards a resilient public sphere : fighting disinformation and promoting media literacy

Abstract

Disinformation and misinformation have been among the most pressing policy challenges since the 2010s. As false and misleading content has become a frequent sight on popular news intermediaries, concerns have arisen about the risks this phenomenon might pose to democracy in general, including the integrity of elections, the management of health crises, and the quality of the information environment. As such, policymakers in the EU and individual member states had proposed a number of measures to mitigate the problem, among others by regulating online platforms, fostering media literacy and research on disinformation, as well as supporting fact-checking activities. Still, there are only a few countries at the time of writing where the fight against disinformation is considered successful. This chapter proposes a framework that helps explain why some countries prove to be more resilient to disinformation than others, by introducing the concept of disinformation risk awareness. We assess countries' resilience based on indicators that capture the extent of policy responses, as well as societies' ability to identify disinformation-related threats through media literacy. We propose a typology of low, mixed, and high disinformation risk awareness with three case studies for Finland, Hungary, and Lithuania. The countries were assessed based on the results of the Media Pluralism Monitor 2023.