Government responses to disinformation: a review

Recently, research on online disinformation has preoccupied researchers from different disciplines greatly. Prior research on governments’ actions to curb online disinformation opened great possibilities for comparative and other research. We set out to study if democratic governments approach harmful false narratives online differently than their more autocratic counterparts, if the wealth of a nation dictates different, or more diversified approaches to curb this phenomenon and in addition, this work outlines major events that have led to governments introducing legislation and other initiatives. Our research focusses on providing a database of government responses to online disinformation (until 2021) to achieve a reference work that includes most government responses worldwide (n=180) from ninety-nine countries on six continents. The data was collected by combining existing databases, accessing official documents, legal texts and, where needed, supplemented by journalistic articles. We categorised every initiative in 11 non-mutually exclusive categories that describe the initiative in its intent, objective and if it is aimed at any particular type of disinformation. Ten of these categories, and the methodology to categorise each initiative, were taken from the work “Balancing act: Countering digital disinformation while respecting freedom of expression” (Bontcheva et al., 2020). We added an eleventh category “Covid-19 specific” to indicate which initiatives were taken as a response to fake news and other kinds of disinformation pertaining the coronavirus, government initiatives to curb the pandemic or other false narratives that could harm public health during the pandemic. Additionally, we set up a comparative research design to assess whether different types of governments (democratic/authoritarian) approach the fight against online disinformation differently, whether the amount of press freedom has a significant correlation with the types of initiatives and, if the observed initiatives in the first part of this research are impacted by the overall wealth of a nation (measured in GDP per capita) by means of a statistical analysis. We conclude that indeed, democratic and authoritarian governments approach online disinformation with a statistically significant difference. Interestingly, this difference drops in significance concerning recent covid-19 specific initiatives confirming the findings of other publications such as the “pandemic backsliding” project (Edgell & Lachapelle, 2021). Press freedom influences the propensity of governments to introduce measures such as fact-checking and investigative initiatives. This research also concludes that poorer countries tend to provide limited resources for combatting online disinformation. This research not only shows differences between different kinds of governments, but also shows the challenge democracies have combatting a flood of online disinformation on one hand and being restricted by liberal rights on the other. It paints a picture of how authoritarian regimes use the prominence of online disinformation to further repress and control their population in addition to safeguarding their own narratives. Our analysis not only shows an evolution of the focus of counter-disinformation initiatives over time but outlines crucial differences between democratic and authoritarian approaches to combatting disinformation.