Societal Resilience to Disinformation in Baltic Region and Ukraine

• In Event: Poster Session: Middle East and North African Politics & Posters on Europe
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Posters on Europe

Abstract

Information war has been an instrument of politics for years, yet its role in an open military aggression on the European continent has not yet been explored – there was no occasion. When in 2022 the occasion arose in Ukraine, it has luckily survived the Russian blitzkrieg, but the conflict is far from over. And although Ukrainian defense against information war is valuable experience, there are a lot of things to be done in that field, and not only by Ukraine but, for instance, the Baltic region, where the disinformation remains important problem. Although the Euro integration of the region, the counterpublics with pro-Russian views still have voice in the region, and their integration remains an important issue. While resort to the military activities by Russia against NATO countries is unlikely, the efforts in discrediting the authorities or setting up the social tensions may be continuing.
While information war has been studied by academics and practitioners, given the length of the processes it is necessary to understand how to make society more resilient – especially if we are open about the fact that overcoming disinformation is impossible, and the solution is adapting to efficiently function in the world where it almost prevails. And this is not about what narratives are being spread, but rather what are the social practices of response.
Resilience to the disinformation has also been discussed in academia, and several macro-conditions predicting it may be mentioned – such as society polarization, trust in media, strength of the counterpublics, media literacy level, etc. Yet, most of these characteristics are fluid, while strategically it is interesting what are the sources of resilience which allow it becoming inherent to society, turning into the way of thinking.
Media-literacy development or and fact-checking initiatives, for instance, belong to the participatory instruments of developing resilience “here and today”. However, though they are encouraging critical thinking, do they contribute to the modus operandi of societies? Also, it is not only important what knowledge people have on fact-checking, but is they are engaging in it.
If considering it as a permanent phenomenon, disinformation brings up the question of its long-term effects. The disinformation campaigns, even those being debunked, are well-synchronized and leave mark on society and on individuals. This cumulative effect may be either benign, giving “collective immunity” and allowing to study on the mistakes, or malignant, loosening the trust mechanisms in the society.
In other words, we may assume that the resilience to the disinformation should be sustainable in essence and flexible in measures. Since resilience exists both on the individual and societal levels, a question arises if one of those levels reinforces another, or resilience sustaining assumes movement of the parties towards each other?
Giddens' theory of structuration may be an instrument to help understanding the societal resilience to disinformation, what enhances it, and how macro and micro level are related.
The social practices as the activities linking micro and macro levels have a dualistic nature – being both result of the individuals' actions and the condition for their activity. For instance, sharing a publication one agrees with in Facebook is both an individual moment of practice, and represents the social practice. Social practice in the information sphere, being an ongoing series of practical activities, is either something being done by the individuals – e.g. web-surfing, “liking” and posting in social media, reading Telegram channels – or being reproduced over time by the social systems (which are people brought together by the regular activities) - fact-checking, teaching media literacy, spreading disinformation or debunking it, elaborating policies to curb negative impact of disinformation.
This participation in social systems underwrites the human potential for agency – for instance, choosing to verify the catchy information before the publication not only makes one’s information bubble protected from the fake news but contributes to the preservation of healthier information environment in general. Thus, every person has certain social power, being not predictable in actions. In studying the resilience to the disinformation, agency can be understood as the ability of the actors to mobilize resources to fight off the information disorders, and structures in this case will be the perception of the disinformation narratives by the people, cognitive understanding, and political and social actions (i.e., discourse reproduction) as the response to the disinformation.
The present research is aimed at answering the question what social practices provide for the higher level of societal resilience to the disinformation, and at developing a research framework towards the empirical research (with pilot study).

Author

• Dmytro Iarovyi, Vytautas Magnus University