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- ItemDisinformation Resilience in Backsliding Democracies: Media Trust, Civil Society, and Institutional Capture(Weizenbaum Institute, 2025-04-25 00:00:00) Peißker, Antonia; Cowburn, Mike; Klinger, UlrikeSocieties’ resilience to disinformation is often linked to democratic backsliding, but the relationships between these concepts remain poorly understood. To measure structural resilience to disinformation, we expand the framework developed for consolidated Western democracies by Humprecht et al. (2020) to democracies that are experiencing varying degrees of democratic backsliding; the Visegrád Group of Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. Our application leads us to generate additional macro-level features that should be incorporated when thinking about disinformation resilience in states experiencing democratic backsliding. Specifically, we identify how the role of civil society operates differently depending on the level of democracy and that the value of media trust is conditioned by the degree of institutional capture, adding these complementary measures to the original framework. Our updated empirical analyses suggest that, of our cases, Slovakia had the greatest and Hungary had the least resilience to disinformation. The advancement of the framework enables its application beyond consolidated democracies by identifying additional aspects that help build structural resilience to disinformation elsewhere.
- ItemThe Art of the (Platform) Deal(Weizenbaum Institute, 2025-04-17) Watt, Ned; Montaña-Niño, Silvia; Riedlinger, MichelleIn January 2025, the platform company Meta abruptly announced that it would be ending its industry-leading third-party fact-checking (3PFC) program starting with fact checkers in the United States. This decision aligns with recent changes in the US administration and heralds a cultural shift in how big tech platforms approach both content moderation and political relations. Specifically, it marks a move away from policy that emphasizes consensus building towards more explicit political deal-making. This decision also highlights the vulnerabilities faced by fact checkers, whose economic model and democratic initiative largely depend on platform-supported fact checking. This article addresses the critical implications of these developments, considering the history of 3PFC as it relates to US politics, recent changes to digital information ecosystems, and the dynamics of power structures around the politics of information, technology, and truth.