From stealing elections to corrupting young people. What have we learned about disinformation in 2024?

Foreign disinformation targeting Central European democracies rapidly re-invents itself and becomes more disruptive. The groups behind disinformation attacks aim to undermine these sometimes fragile democracies and increase societal divides. It thrives where people feel scared of a war, sceptical of democratic institutions, powerless to change anything or disconnected from independent media. Elections, war, climate change, and food are only a few areas that foreign creators of fake news exploit daily.

A new report by Piotr Drabik, SCIENCE+, the largest network of disinformation-resilient journalism in Central Europe, points out where our societies are the most vulnerable to foreign-backed influence and offers success stories to inspire us all to deal with it head-on.

The report highlights insights and reflections from SCIENCE+ network of 50+ fact-checking and media partners across Central and Eastern Europe. It warns of a clear correlation: the communities with high levels of distrust in journalism are also the ones hit by disinformation the hardest. Still, too many in Central Europe feel that conventional news outlets don’t provide solutions-oriented coverage or are not practical enough to empower them to deal with problems affecting their everyday lives, including disinformation. Fact-checking is great, but not enough. The report stresses the urgent need to invest more time and resources in ‘pre-bunking’ and solutions journalism.

“One of the biggest disinformation trends we’ve registered this year in Central Europe is how foreign-designed disinformation campaigns have become integral companions to extreme weather events and democratic elections. But they have only exploited the societal rifts we already had and failed to address, such as public polarization, the exacerbation of feelings of insecurity and uncertainty amidst the profound changes brought about by climate change, the war in Ukraine, and conflicts in the Middle East,” says co-author Kateryna Savranska, a disinformation analyst at SCIENCE+. 

The most impactful disinformation attacks

As the report shows, the most impactful disinformation attacks this year didn’t actually create novel narratives or conspiracies. Instead, they repackaged long-running fakes to fit new developments. For example, during this year’s historic floods in Central Europe, foreign-backed disinformation campaigns reused weather engineering conspiracies and false rumours that local governments helped Ukraine more than their own citizens. The goal of these disinformation efforts is to destabilize trust in institutions and democracy, using whichever narratives can most effectively achieve that goal in a specific time and place.

Another example is anti-vaccine disinformation. Almost five years after the COVID-19 pandemic started, the same false claims about viruses and alternative medicine have been deployed to fuel public fears over measles and outbreaks of exotic viral diseases, which have become more common due to the intensifying effects of climate change. 

Fuelling public fears

In 2024, foreign actors kept fuelling public fears about an imminent war with Russia, eroding solidarity with Ukraine, and polarizing our societies with an exaggerated depiction of a West vs East stand-off. The only difference is that these tactics have now become the backbone of regular mass attacks on our democratic elections on our democratic elections, with Slovakia, Bulgaria, Moldova, and Romania being the most severe examples.

The SCIENCE+ report warns that young Central Europeans are more vulnerable to disinformation than ever. They often don’t see themselves in the news and rely heavily on questionable influencers for information. This disconnect increasingly often results in the youngsters leaning toward conservative and radical populist politicians, who exploit these vulnerabilities.

Young and senior audience

Overall, large sections of the general public in Central Europe, both young and senior, often feel disempowered and do not believe that anything can be changed or that they can influence the course their countries are on. The report warns that these people often feel like journalism talks to them patronisingly. When SCIENCE+ partners experimented with encouraging such people to participate in shaping news coverage, connecting it to their daily needs and concerns, they registered a direct correlation with increased trust, engagement, and reduced vulnerability to disinformation. The greater the transparency of newsrooms about what they cover, why, and how, the more this resilience showed. 

The SCIENCE+ report also highlights another group of Central Europeans that is becoming a common target of foreign-backed disinformation attacks: linguistic, ethnic, and other disenfranchised minorities.

”This year, we identified that these groups are vulnerable to disinformation due to a lack of news media being available in minority languages; state-sponsored propaganda directly targeting these groups; and a feeling of growing isolation from wider society,” says Catherine Edwards, a SCIENCE+ audience analyst and a co-author of the report. 

Disinformation vulnerabilities

These disinformation vulnerabilities are closely linked to the profound shifts within our societies regarding what audiences want from journalism. They strongly value “human” characteristics in reporting, such as empathy, over the enforced formality of impartiality practised by traditional broadcast and newspaper journalism.  

This report documents the experience of SCIENCE+ partners in the last year, including their experiments with different storytelling styles, formats, and engagement approaches, which confirms this trend. However, it also shows clear successes in how newsrooms can adapt and better serve their audiences by increasing their resilience in the face of disinformation.

You can learn more about the 2024 disinformation trends here, as well as guidelines for journalists on how to connect with disinformation-affected people. 

SCIENCE+ is a flagship transborder network standing at the vanguard of public resilience to disinformation in Central and Eastern Europe. Together with 50+ partner newsrooms, fact-checking, and research organizations, we are fostering more public trust and critical engagement over complex issues manipulated by disinformation. Founded and managed by Free Press for Eastern Europe, we offer a fresh approach to impactful and trust-worthy storytelling through cross-industry bridge-building, maximizing innovative audience strategies, best regional expertise, and harnessing AI.