From disinformation to democratic resilience

A public world under pressure

Every society needs ways of making the world publicly intelligible. Events enter collective life through institutions, images, journalism, political language, memory and, increasingly, digital platforms. Through these forms of mediation, facts acquire sequence and meaning: a crisis is named, responsibility assigned, danger located, suffering recognized or ignored. Without mediation, social life fragments into private impressions; with it, a public world becomes possible.

The question of information has therefore always been broader than accuracy. Citizens must understand events they have not witnessed and assess claims they cannot verify on their own. Walter Lippmann’s “pictures in our heads” captured this problem a century ago: people encounter the world through condensed representations shaped by journalism, stereotypes, political narratives and repetition (Lippmann, 1922). These representations make judgment possible, but also vulnerable.

Disinformation works on that vulnerability. Its power lies less in inventing reality than in redirecting perception. A false claim about electoral fraud may be disproved and still leave elections seeming opaque. A fabricated story about migrants may collapse factually while reinforcing a sense of cultural or security threat. A manipulated image may be exposed yet continue to organize anger. The effect is often residue: distrust after correction, suspicion after evidence, hostility after clarification.

Media literacy must therefore mean more than identifying false information. It is a democratic competence: the ability to recognize how information is framed, emotionally mobilized, algorithmically amplified and directed against particular groups. In this sense, it becomes part of democratic resilience.

Old grammars, new infrastructures

The politics of perception predates digital platforms. Machiavelli understood that rule depended partly on appearance. Modern mass media expanded both public knowledge and the capacity for propaganda and enemy-making. The Dreyfus Affair showed how false accusation could activate anxieties around loyalty, nation and antisemitism; in a radically different and catastrophic context, RTLM radio in Rwanda showed how mediated speech could help turn fear into dehumanization. The underlying grammar is older than the platform age: falsehood becomes dangerous when it attaches itself to belonging.

Digital platforms inherit this grammar while transforming its speed, scale and architecture. Rumour travels before institutions can respond. Images lose context across borders. Conspiracy narratives gain credibility through repetition by users, influencers and partisan communities. Visibility is increasingly organized through ranking, recommendation and engagement systems. Authority can emerge not from a recognizable source but from circulation itself: recurrence, familiarity and emotional intensity.

The distinction between disinformation and misinformation remains useful, but content rarely stays fixed as it moves. A fabricated claim may be shared by people who believe it, then reframed or attached to a new image; eventually, repetition may matter more than original intent (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017). Synthetic media deepen the problem by making fabrications convincing while authentic evidence becomes easier to dismiss as fake. Arendt’s concern with factual truth is therefore newly relevant: democratic life depends on institutions, records, witnesses and publics willing to preserve a distinction between what happened and what people wish or fear happened (Arendt, 1967).

When suspicion acquires a target

Online hate gives informational disorder a social direction. Fear becomes easier to mobilize when it has a face. Migrants, Roma, Muslims, Jews, LGBTQI+ people, journalists or human-rights defenders can be made to signify disorder, decline, betrayal or hidden power. Hate speech injures dignity, but it also rearranges belonging by presenting some people as natural members of the public world and others as conditional presences whose rights or voices must continually be justified.

Suspicion rarely becomes hostility through one message; the process is cumulative. Memes, jokes, insinuations, decontextualized statistics and ironic exaggerations can create a mood in which exclusion becomes familiar before it becomes explicit. A group need not be named as an enemy every time; repeated association with danger, disorder or threat may be enough.

This is why fact-checking, although essential, cannot by itself repair democratic harm. Correcting a claim does not necessarily undo the emotional association or social boundary it helped reinforce. The problem is not only what citizens believe, but how they see one another.

Algorithms and the politics of visibility

Algorithmic systems do not create racism, antisemitism, misogyny, xenophobia or conspiratorial thinking; these histories precede the platform age. What algorithms shape is the environment in which some narratives recur, become more visible and gain emotional reward. As Gillespie argues, algorithmic ordering helps produce public relevance by influencing what appears timely and worth engaging with (Gillespie, 2014).

Some form of selection is unavoidable; no user could navigate online content without filtering. The democratic question is therefore not whether platforms should recommend content, but according to which priorities. When visibility is organized mainly around predicted engagement, material provoking fear, anger or conflict may gain an advantage over material requiring reflection. The scale of a message is thus not simply an individual choice; it is also a product of platform design.

The danger should not be reduced to a mechanical story of “algorithmic radicalization.” People bring prior identities and grievances to digital environments. Yet repeated, personalized exposure can reinforce suspicions and normalize harder vocabularies. A citizen may reject explicit hatred while growing accustomed to its categories, or support democracy while increasingly seeing institutions as captured, opponents as enemies and minorities as threats. Affective polarization captures part of this shift: disagreement becomes moral aversion, and the other side appears not simply wrong but corrupt or dangerous (Iyengar, Sood & Lelkes, 2012).

Media literacy as democratic capacity

More information does not automatically produce better-informed citizens. In an environment of excess and personalization, access may coexist with a declining ability to compare claims, reconstruct context and understand why particular content reaches us.

UNESCO’s concept of media and information literacy includes the ability to access, critically evaluate, use, create and share information and media content ethically and effectively (UNESCO, 2021). Today that capacity must also include an understanding of framing, emotional manipulation, personalization, algorithmic visibility and the consequences of sharing.

Media literacy is therefore epistemic, affective, algorithmic and civic. It is epistemic because citizens must distinguish evidence from assertion and uncertainty from deception; affective because manipulation works through fear, humiliation and resentment; algorithmic because online visibility is ranked, personalized and monetized; and civic because sharing, mocking or amplifying content participates in the circulation of meaning. A media-literate citizen is not someone who never doubts, but someone who knows how to doubt without turning doubt into generalized suspicion.

This connects media literacy to freedom of expression and the right to receive information. Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Article 11 of the EU Charter protect freedom of expression and information. Neither provision explicitly establishes a right to media literacy. Formal access has limited value if citizens cannot navigate how information is selected and presented. Media literacy does not authorize the state to determine belief; it strengthens citizens’ autonomy to judge within a pluralistic public sphere.

Responsibility beyond the individual

That responsibility cannot be placed on citizens alone. A democracy cannot demand critical judgment while leaving untouched infrastructures that profit from confusion, outrage and fear. Public policy should strengthen citizens’ ability to orient themselves without systematic manipulation or exclusion, while protecting independent judgment. This includes education, independent journalism, reliable public information, transparent political communication, protection for groups targeted by hate and institutions that do not themselves exploit conspiracy or dehumanization.

Platforms are part of this field of responsibility because they are infrastructures of visibility, not neutral containers. The EU Digital Services Act is important precisely because it treats certain harms as systemic risks connected to the design and functioning of very large online platforms and very large online search engines, including risks to civic discourse, electoral processes and fundamental rights. The question is no longer only whether a particular post should stay online. It is also whether design choices systematically reward manipulation, hostility or sensationalism.

Civil society occupies a distinct position. Community organizations encounter the lived consequences of informational disorder: migration anxieties, racism, antisemitism, gender-based hostility, local mistrust and electoral rumours. Journalists can correct a falsehood; trusted intermediaries may better explain why it became believable. Democratic resilience also benefits from early, non-coercive intervention - prebunking, trusted referral pathways, community support and credible information before grievance hardens into hostility. Such initiatives reconnect information with trust, context and community support.

Democratic resilience without policing truth

There is an equal danger in responding too aggressively. States defending democracy from disinformation may slide from countering manipulation toward policing truth. Platforms pressed to remove harmful material at scale may rely on automated systems unable to distinguish incitement from satire, documentation or legitimate criticism. A democratic response must therefore combine action against genuine harm with transparency, human review, proportionality and meaningful appeal.

Media literacy offers a different logic. It does not ask citizens to obey an official version of reality. It asks them to become more capable of judging reality publicly: to examine claims, understand context, recognize manipulation and dehumanization, and remain open to disagreement.

Public life will remain mediated, contested and incomplete. The question is whether citizens can inhabit uncertainty without surrendering to cynicism; whether disagreement can remain political without becoming existential; whether fear can be addressed without being converted into hatred; and whether truth can be pursued without being monopolized by power.

Democratic resilience is not the restoration of a lost informational order. It is the construction of a public culture capable of surviving disorder without being brutalized by it. Where disinformation fragments the public world and online hate narrows recognition, algorithmic amplification can reinforce suspicion. Media literacy must therefore do more than correct errors. It must sustain the capacities through which people can read the world together, disagree without dehumanizing and recognize one another as participants in democratic life.

References

• Arendt, H. (1967). “Truth and Politics.” The New Yorker, February 25.
• European Convention on Human Rights. Article 10: Freedom of Expression.
• European Union. (2012). Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. Official Journal of the European Union.
• European Union. (2022). Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 on a Single Market for Digital Services (Digital Services Act). Official Journal of the European Union.
• Gillespie, T. (2014). “The Relevance of Algorithms.” In T. Gillespie, P. Boczkowski and K. Foot (eds.), Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (pp. 167–194). MIT Press.
• Iyengar, S., Sood, G. and Lelkes, Y. (2012). “Affect, Not Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization.” Public Opinion Quarterly, 76(3), 405–431.
• Lippmann, W. (1922). Public Opinion. Harcourt, Brace and Company.
• Machiavelli, N. (1532). The Prince.
• UNESCO. (2021). Media and Information Literate Citizens: Think Critically, Click Wisely! UNESCO Publishing.
• Wardle, C. and Derakhshan, H. (2017). Information Disorder: Toward an Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policy Making. Council of Europe.