State actions against disinformation: Towards a healthy public sphere

Across the world, states have taken initiatives against disinformation. However, we still lack a structured understanding of these measures assessing commonalities and differences, advantages, and risks of government responses to disinformation. To develop a typology, we assessed 66 state counter-disinformation initiatives from countries across all continents that we categorise along five dimensions: Mitigating false information, governing digital intermediaries, promoting transparency and quality in government communications, strengthening media pluralism and professional journalism, and building up public institutions. Our analysis points to the risk of authoritarian abuse of counter-disinformation measures and emphasises the need for comprehensive and integrated strategies. Where governments choose to actively counter disinformation, they must adopt a combination of online and offline measures. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to countering disinformation and the narrower the focus, the greater the risk of infringing citizen rights.

This report is part of an international research series conducted under the theme “strengthening democracy, countering disinformation”, commissioned and supported by the Upgrade Democracy team between 2023-2024