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This research examines the spread of disinformation on social media platforms and its impact on state resilience through a systematic literature review of 150 peer-reviewed studies published between 2014 and 2024. The analysis revealed that disinformation spreads six times faster than accurate information, with emotions and platform algorithms playing a significant role in its spread. Factors such as low digital literacy, political polarization, and declining trust in institutions increase people's vulnerability to disinformation. Impacts on national security include threats to the integrity of democratic processes, the erosion of social cohesion, and decreased public trust. The most effective coping strategies include improving digital literacy (78 percent effective), fact-checking (65 percent), and content regulation (59 percent). However, these efforts face ethical and legal challenges, especially regarding freedom of expression. This research highlights the need for a multidimensional approach in addressing the "information pandemic", integrating technological, educational, and policy strategies while considering ethical implications. The findings provide a foundation for further policy development and research to protect the integrity of public information spaces and state resilience in the digital age.

In today's modern information society, the online environment is a natural, ubiquitous and often irreplaceable part of working, social and private life. The Internet has spread globally in recent years and is now accessible to the vast majority of the human population, developing constantly, dynamically, and affecting, to a greater or lesser extent, all areas, spheres or sectors of human society and human life in general, including communication. On the one hand, it offers many positives to mankind, but on the other hand, it also brings many negatives in the form of its potential misuse and dissemination of false, misleading, distorted, incomplete, and/or fabricated information - misinformation. For this reason, the author of the present article uses relevant scientific methods and approaches, and as part of the interdisciplinary research, deals with disinformation as a security threat spreading on the Internet, since it enables influencing individuals, social groups, and a large part of the public, shaping their attitudes, behaviour, and perception of reality.

The objective of this study is to identify and analyse the methods of disinformation utilized by Russia to disseminate information in the Ukrainian information field. The main tasks include defining the concept of disinformation and explaining its societal dangers, characterising Information-Psychological Operations (IPSO) as a component of Russia's disinformation campaign against Ukraine and investigating the most prevalent elements utilised by Russia in the dissemination of disinformation. This study is aimed at the synthesis and combination of methods of monitoring, content analysis, and comparative analysis. The article selects publications that exhibit disinformation targeted at Ukrainian society. Disinformation propagated by Russia is subsequently refuted by either foreign or Ukrainian publications, including the "NotaEnota" organisation. The study reveals that Russian disinformation aims to propagate specific narratives and manipulate mass consciousness. Disinformation involves intentionally creating misleading and manipulative content, often in the form of artificially created fakes. The information field of Ukraine has become the primary battleground for Russia's hybrid warfare tactics, which include disinformation, propaganda, and fakes. To effectively counter these tactics, society needs to develop critical thinking skills and media literacy to discern and evaluate information critically. Future research aims to delve deeper into the methods employed in creating disinformation, their objectives, and potential strategies to prevent or counteract their influence.

This paper focuses on how Brazilian politicians helped to spread disinformation about Covid-19 vaccines, discussing legitimation strategies and actors that played a significant role on Twitter and Facebook. Based on data gathered through CrowdTangle and Twitter API, we selected the 250 most shared/retweeted posts for each dataset (n=500) and examined if they contained disinformation, who posted it, and what strategy was used to legitimize this discourse. Our findings indicate that politicians and hyperpartisan accounts have a key influence in validating the Brazilian president's populist discourse through rationalization (pseudo-science) and denunciation (against the vaccine). The political frame also plays an important role in disinformation messages.

With the development of a wide range of modern technologies, the rapid spread and wide availability of the Internet, as well as the extensive use of various information and communication tools and devices, a new range of possibilities have emerged for people, such as information retrieval, processing, and dissemination. However, at the same time, a new range of opportunities has emerged for the spread of misleading, deceptive and false information – disinformation –spread by state and non-state actors with the aim of influencing the functioning of democratic society and people's behaviour. The spread of disinformation thus currently represents an extremely dangerous threat that can have very negative consequences for individuals, organisations, and the entire society. For this reason, as part of the conducted security research, the author of this paper, deals with the issue of disinformation, points out the danger of its spread, defines the concept of disinformation and at the same time, discusses the possibilities of eliminating the consequences of the spread of disinformation.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- The Editor Team -- About the Contributors -- Democracy in the Disinformation Age: Influence and Activism in American Politics -- PART 1 Awakening of Activism -- 1 Social Media for Social Good through a Public Policy Lens: What Role Does Social Media Play in the Creation and Sustainability of Social Movements? -- 2 "Woke" Culture: The Societal and Political Implications of Black Lives Matter Digital Activism -- 3 Outreach and Empowerment: Civic Engagement, Advocacy, and Amplification of the Women's Movement -- PART 2 Disruptions in the Digital Age -- 4 Fake News, Reality Apathy, and the Erosion of Trust and Authenticity in American Politics -- 5 The Volume Inside of this Bus Is Astronomical: Political Communication and Legitimacy on TikTok -- 6 The Legal Landscape: The First Amendment, Section 230, and Online Liability -- PART 3 Misinformation and Disinformation: Spread and Influence -- 7 Infowars and the Crisis of Political Misinformation on Social Media -- 8 Combating Misinformation in Risk: Emotional Appeal in False Beliefs -- 9 From Russia with Love: A Social Psychological Analysis of Information Warfare in the Social Media Age -- 10 Fighting Disinformation in Social Media: An Online Persuasion Perspective -- Glossary -- Index.

When it comes to election interference from China and disinformation in general, Taiwan faces serious challenges. This episode of "Dispatch from Taiwan" tackles the spread of disinformation in Taiwan, the role of China, and how civic society has stepped up to shore up digital resilience.

This work analyses the treatment of elements such as biases and their relationship with disinformation in international academic production. The first step in this process was to carry out a search for papers published in academic journals indexed in the main indexing platforms. This was followed by a bibliometric analysis involving an analysis of the production and impact of the selected publications, using social media techniques and a semantic content analysis based on abstracts. The data obtained from Web of Science, Scopus, and Dimensions, relating to health, biases, and fake news as well as post-truth, show how these works have multiplied in the last decade. The question relating to this research is as follows: How have cognitive biases been treated in national and international academic journals? This question is answered with respect to the scientific or research method. The results, which date from 2000 to 2024, show a considerable academic dedication to exploring the relationship between biases and health disinformation. In all these communities we have observed a relationship between production with the field of medicine as a general theme and social media. Furthermore, this connection is always tied to other subjects, such as an aversion to vaccines in Community 10; disinformation about COVID-19 on social media in Community 5; COVID-19 and conspiracy theories in Community 6; and content for the dissemination of health-related subjects on YouTube and the disinformation spread about them. The community analysis carried out shows a common factor in all the analysed communities—that of cognitive bias.

This article tackles the circulation of disinformation and compares it to fact-checking links about COVID-19 on Facebook in Brazil. Through a mixed-methods approach, we use disinformation and fact-checking links provided by the International Fact-Checking Network/Poynter, which we looked for in CrowdTangle. Using this data set, we explore (1) which types of public groups/pages spread disinformation and fact-checking content on Facebook; (2) the role of political ideology in this process; and (3) the network dynamics of how disinformation and fact-checking circulate on Facebook. Our results show that disinformation tend to circulate more on political pages/groups aligned with the far right and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, on religious and conspiracy theory pages/groups and alternative (hyperpartisan) media. On the other hand, fact-checking circulates more on leftists' pages/groups. This implicates that the discussion about COVID-19 in Brazil is influenced by a structure of asymmetric polarization, as disinformation spread is fueled by radicalized far-right groups.

In January 2018, the European Commission set up a highlevel group of experts («the HLEG») to advise on policy initiatives to counter fake news and disinformation spread online. The HLEG consisted of 39 members and was chaired by Prof. Dr. Madeleine de Cock Buning. Its members had different backgrounds, including academia and journalism, written press and broadcasting organizations, online platforms as well as civil society and fact-checking organizations. The HLEG's tasks were to advise the Commission on all issues arising in the context of false information spread across traditional and social media and on possible ways to cope with its social and political consequences. The main deliverable of the HLEG was a report designed to review best practices in the light of fundamental principles, and suitable responses stemming from such principles. The analysis presented in this Report starts from a shared understanding of disinformation as a phenomenon that goes well beyond the term «fake news». This term has been appropriated and used misleadingly by powerful actors to dismiss coverage that is simply found disagreeable. Disinformation as defined in this Report includes all forms of false, inaccurate, or misleading information designed, presented and promoted to intentionally cause public harm or for profit. It does not cover issues arising from the creation and dissemination online of illegal content (notably defamation, hate speech, incitement to violence), which are subject to regulatory remedies under EU or national laws. Nor does it cover other forms of deliberate but not misleading distortions of facts such a satire and parody. Problems of disinformation are deeply intertwined with the development of digital media. They are driven by actors — state or non-state political actors, for-profit actors, media, citizens, individually or in groups — and by manipulative uses of communication infrastructures that have been harnessed to produce, circulate and amplify disinformation on a larger scale than previously, often in new ways that are still poorly mapped and understood. ; -- 1. Problem definition and scope of the Report -- 2. Measures already taken by various stakeholders -- 3. Key principles and general, short- and long-term objectives -- 4. Responses and actions -- 4a. Transparency -- 4b. Media and information literacy -- 4c. Empowerment of users and journalists -- 4d. Diversity and sustainability of the news media ecosystem -- 4e.Process and evaluation -- 5. Conclusions: summary of actions

"The recent rampant global problem of the rampant spread of disinformation in and through the digital ecosystem can perhaps be traced directly to the technological changes in the realm of media production, circulation and consumption. As media tools have become commonplace and user-friendly, the utopian dream of critical media scholarship that sought to democratize speech seems closer to reality than ever before. Alongside this process, the simultaneous decline of editorial authority of traditional media organizations has led to the rise of practices such as citizen journalism that have provided checks and balances to fill in the gaps in coverage of dominant top-down media institutions. Additionally, as users have gradually appropriated the available tools of media production, they have done so for various subversive ends including a now thriving global culture of parody, satire and critique (Wasserman 2020; Kumar 2015) using existing genres and formats to challenge dominant media texts, institutions and discourses. Often adopting the format of the very texts they seek to critique, parodic texts such as news reports and analysis don't fit the category of misinformation as they openly reveal their fake nature, even if towards the end"--

This research scrutinizes the content, spread, and implications of disinformation in Brazil's 2018 pre-election period. It focuses specifically on the most widely shared fake news about Lula da Silva and links these with the preexisting polarization and political radicalization, ascertaining the role of context. The research relied on a case study and mixed-methods approach that combined an online data collection of content, spread, propagators, and interactions' analyses, with in-depth analysis of the meaning of such fake news. The results show that the most successful fake news about Lula capitalized on prior hostility toward him, several originated or were spread by conservative right-wing politicians and mainstream journalists, and that the pro-Lula fake news circulated in smaller networks and had overall less global reach. Facebook and WhatsApp were the main dissemination platforms of these contents. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

As fake news becomes more pervasive with the increasing adoption of digital platforms, understanding how disinformation spread and the factors that contribute to its continuation has become crucial, given the detrimental effects for democracies. This study investigates the spread of fake news during the Presidential Elections of 2018 in Brazil and how distinct social media and websites are used as distribution platforms and sources of disinformation. For such, a pre-existing data set of 346 fake news stories collected during the elections served as a starting point. Initially, through a reverse search process, the main websites responsible for disseminating disinformation were mapped. These sources were then analysed in terms of traffic and partisanship. Beyond a prevalence of right-wing fake news sources, a high concentration of web traffic was found. Five websites were responsible for almost 80% of all pageviews (or impressions) from all the 58 identified fake news sources. Furthermore, in order to investigate the circulation of disinformation on Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp, the data set was filtered into the 58 most relevant unique fake news stories, which were later classified by political bias, engagement (number of shares), and segregated in four narratives. Firstly, it was found that all the analysed social media served as relevant distribution platforms for fake news, once 32 out of the 58 fake news stories circulated in all of them. Yet, Facebook was found to be more relevant than Twitter for that purpose. Secondly, the four major narratives that shaped the fake news stories were mostly related to an intense polarization and declining rates of trust in public institutions and media vehicles. Among these, fake news related to anti-left/anti-workers were predominant. Similarly to the first analysis, partisanship was noticeable during the spread of disinformation, as there were ten times more pro-Bolsonaro (or anti-Haddad) fake news stories than the polar opposite. Finally, the findings indicate that, ...