“I think many people – not only researchers, but also journalists and politicians – have underestimated how radically different our information landscape is now compared with just 20 years ago, and how extremely vulnerable we are,” says Åsa Wikforss.
Åsa Wikforss
Professor of theoretical philosophy, Stockholm University
As a professor of theoretical philosophy at Stockholm University, she had thought a lot about knowledge and its importance for individuals and society. Then came the year 2016. The British voted themselves out of the EU after a referendum campaign that featured an exceptional amount of false and misleading information. The Americans elected a president who had no interest in expert knowledge and whose list of lies grew longer by the week.
“We saw a new world emerging,” she tells us, “where digital technologies and platforms offered entirely new ways to disrupt democratic decision-making. Disinformation was used to manipulate voters, set group against group, counteract knowledge and make democracy dysfunctional.”
In 2018, her research team was awarded SEK 50.4 million by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ), an independent foundation focused on promoting and supporting research in the humanities and social sciences, to lead the interdisciplinary research programme Knowledge Resistance. This programme was completed at the end of 2024 and has contributed to the large increase in research in this field since 2016.
So what new insights has all this new research on false and misleading information and knowledge resistance given us?
“We have a much better diagnosis of the situation now. We know a lot more about how disinformation is spread, how knowledge resistance works and what drives it. What we need more of, and where research has not progressed as far as we had hoped, is solutions,” says Wikforss.
As a philosopher, she recognises that it is in the nature of knowledge to be vulnerable. There is always uncertainty, and evidence can be weak or strong.
“It is possible to sow doubt, even when we know something very well. It is possible to destroy people’s knowledge simply by undermining trust in reliable sources. When we are manipulated in different ways, democracy is in very great danger.”
In a liberal democracy, the equal value of all people is fundamental. Majority rule must therefore be balanced with protection for minorities. The power of the state must be balanced with individual rights and freedoms and the rule of law. Legislative, judicial and executive powers must be kept separate to prevent concentration and abuse of power. Strong, independent and accountable media and academic institutions are essential for people to be able to make informed decisions, have substantive debates and hold politicians to account.
“I was very worried in 2016,” says Wikforss, “but I don’t think I realised then how dangerous the developments were. And we see that now, when you might say that American democracy is being dismantled very rapidly.”
Another member of the Knowledge Resistance research programme is Jesper Strömbäck, a professor of journalism and political communication at Gothenburg University. He explains that research in recent years has provided more knowledge about which media are associated with people harbouring false and misleading perceptions of reality: primarily social media and right-wing alternative media, both in Sweden and other countries.
“Left-wing alternative media, such as Dagens ETC and others, do not have that effect at all,” he says. “It is limited to the far right.”
Jesper Strömbäck
Professor of journalism and political communication, Gothenburg University
He believes there are two reasons for this. One is that left-wing alternative media in Sweden are less alternative. What is alternative about them is primarily that they raise other issues, not the way they report. This is because they adhere to journalistic norms and values, unlike the right-wing alternative media’s reporting, which is based more on forming opinions. The second reason is that alternative right-wing media are in opposition to what they consider ‘mainstream’, and they distrust social institutions.
“And therefore they also distrust evidence from state authorities or if researchers come up with some conclusions.”
Each year, Medieakademin, a non-profit association that aims to drive debate on the media and raise awareness about how it influences society, conducts a Trust Barometer survey. This shows that trust in traditional media and various public institutions has not changed very much in Sweden over the past ten years when measuring the population as a whole. However, there is a big difference between sympathisers of different political parties. Only 31 per cent of Sweden Democrat sympathisers trusted the public service broadcaster Swedish Radio in 2024, compared with 57 per cent of Moderate Party sympathisers, 61 per cent of Christian Democrat sympathisers and 81-92 per cent of other parties’ sympathisers.
The lack of trust in traditional media has not just happened by itself and for fact-based reasons. Strömbäck’s research on tweeting by Swedish members of parliament in 2020-2021 showed that Moderate Party members and Sweden Democrats accounted for 89% of the tweets that criticised traditional media in an undermining manner. Moderate Party politician Lars Beckman stood out, with 299 such tweets in a single year.
“Similar studies in other countries all show the same: there has been a long right-wing campaign to portray traditional news media as left-wing, as unreliable, as concealing facts. Sympathisers pick up on this and choose instead to believe politicians and media that echo their opinions and perceptions of reality.”
The fact that the problems are greatest on the right, however, is not a law of nature, Strömbäck emphasises. In countries where left-wing populists are strong – for example Venezuela – the false and misleading information mostly comes from the left.
“There are also strong indications, without us being able to provide empirical evidence, that politicians are less afraid of being caught spreading false and misleading information than they used to be. Trump embodies this. There is no politician that we know has lied so much, so systematically. This does not impact his support negatively, and other politicians have learnt from this.”
So what does the research say about the criticism aimed at traditional media?
“There is a lot the media can be criticised for, but there is no substance to the claims that there is systematic bias one way or the other. If we look at Sweden, we can see that certain parties have been favoured at certain times, and at other times other parties have been favoured. It is more about news values and news logic.”
The traditional media’s method of trying to achieve impartiality by allowing both sides to speak, on the other hand, has been shown to lead to the spread of false and misleading information, says Strömbäck.
“When it comes to opinions, it is reasonable to define impartiality in this way, but when it comes to descriptions of reality, what matters is whether the information you publish is true.”
Jutta Haider is a professor of library and information science at the University of Borås. She describes how the new information landscape has created a universe of alternative epistemic worlds – worlds with their own beliefs and logic regarding reality.
“They use experts, humour, talk shows, research, graphs and other things that support their arguments. They also work quite strategically to bring people into these alternative worlds of knowledge.”
Jutta Haider
Professor of library and information science at the University of Borås
The undermining of previously widely shared norms – such as what constitutes a credible source or factual argument, or even whether it matters what you claim – makes it particularly difficult to counter false and misleading information.
“If you don’t have certain norms as your starting point, you can’t criticise or evaluate anything. It’s like punching into the void.”
Haider is not among those who are surprised by the political developments of the past decade. She grew up in Austria, where the politician Jörg Haider represented a populist and charismatic far right from the mid-1980s.
“He worked very much in the style that we are starting to get accustomed to now. He had a style of debate that completely destroyed the political discourse and which, in fact, we still cannot deal with today.”
Who owns the technology we use in our information landscape, what norms and algorithms are embedded in it and how it is regulated are increasingly important questions. Since Elon Musk took over Twitter in 2022 and changed its name to X, the platform has relaxed rules that were supposed to prevent the spread of false and misleading information. Meta, which owns the Facebook and Instagram platforms, decided to do the same a week before Trump’s recent presidential inauguration. At the same time, Meta scrapped collaboration with third-party fact-checkers that began in 2016. Both X and Meta have also significantly impaired researchers’ access to the platforms’ data.
“In recent years, we researchers have developed better methods, but we have less access to data,” Jutta Haider explains.
While AI can be used to detect disinformation and misinformation, there is widespread concern that developments in AI will also lead to a drastic increase in its production and dissemination. However, researchers have not yet been able to establish that this has occurred.
The fact that AI can now create fake but seemingly realistic material already undermines accountability in general, says Haider.
“It is much easier to claim that things you don’t want to be accountable for are fake.”
At the Swedish Defence Research Agency, FOI, focus on disinformation increased after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. Trying to distort people’s worldview is an old art of war, and it was refined during the Cold War. Russia has worked hard to break the defensive will of Ukrainians through cyber-attacks in parallel with disinformation operations aimed at lowering confidence in the Ukrainian army.
“Russia wants to make Ukrainians believe that their army is corrupt, ineffective and will send them to their deaths for no reason,” says Ola Svenonius, a research director at FOI.
Ola Svenonius
Research director, FOI
The best propaganda is that which is mostly true, says an old cliché. Russian disinformation about the war in Ukraine also includes examples of fake fact-checking – ’corrections’ of fabricated Ukrainian media information.
“It is quite scary when you hear the terminology of fact-checking and the spirit of discovery now also being used to spread distrust of the very institutions that provide or help to scrutinise information,” says Svenonius.
He brings up Ola Svenonius mentions the Sweden Democrats’ troll factory, which TV4 revealed in 2024, as a Swedish example of an attempt to strategically and covertly influence public opinion on social media.
“It was not the first time that political actors have done this, but it was perhaps the first time that it was so clear and obvious in Sweden.”
Because both people and the information landscape are so complex, there are no simple countermeasures. A literature review conducted by Svenonius on the impact of corrections showed a lack of consistency in the results.
However, some general conclusions are that it is best not to repeat the information that is wrong when you make a correction; that corrections have the greatest impact if they are made immediately and by the original source of the information or, secondarily, by an expert; and that corrections on social media are equally effective regardless of how they are expressed.
In 2016, Mikael Klintman, a professor of sociology at Lund University, began researching knowledge resistance. He saw that two assumptions about human beings had dominated previous research but which he himself questioned. One is that we humans are fundamentally fact-rational and knowledge-rational, which would mean that more knowledge would solve the problem. The other assumption is that any irrationality that people do exhibit is due to unconscious bias, and that the solution would be to make people aware of this.
Klintman’s and other research has since shown that group affiliation trumps facts when the two come into conflict. He has also written a book about this.
“I believe that human beings can be fact-rational, but that the most important thing for humans since the hunter-gatherer era has been to be socially rational. Deep down, most of us care most about being appreciated in our group, being trustworthy in the group and maintaining our position and status in the group.
Mikael Klintman
Professor of sociology, Lund University
Klintman sees this knowledge slowly seeping into the research community. However, actors who use misleading information for ideological purposes have long been at the forefront of understanding this and how it can be exploited. Resistance to knowledge therefore needs to be met with more complex and far-reaching measures than factual information, such as measures to reduce segregation between groups, he says.
He wants to see more research on the impact of framing issues and communicating knowledge in ways that take more account of what people care about deep down. For example, information campaigns on environmental and climate issues have mainly been framed in moral terms that appeal to people who are politically left-liberal or green, such as fairness. To reach more conservative groups, it may instead be better to frame information on moral grounds, like leadership and loyalty.
Researchers should also look more closely at how pilot projects can be used for issues where politicians want to make an intervention but there is polarisation or resistance, says Klintman. Once projects are up and running, the very sceptical tend to become more positive, and the intervention tends to become normalised socially in the group. One example is the introduction of traffic congestion tax.
Another method to explore further in order to bridge ideological gaps and address knowledge resistance is collaborative envisioning of the future.
“When different groups have discussed together climate gas-free visions of the future that they find attractive and plausible, they have found it easier to accept that we have a major challenge ahead of us that we need to address.”
What else needs to be researched going forward? The wish list of the researchers interviewed for this article is long. More genuinely cross-disciplinary research, for example through the creation of research centres. More research on countries other than the USA and the UK. More legal science research. More research on threat actors and conspiracy theories. More research on the child perspective. New methods to address the reduced access to data from social media platforms. And more.
The information landscape and the world are changing rapidly, while research takes time to analyse and show what has happened.
“There is a grey area where there are good reasons to assume, given the existing research, that certain things are true even if we do not have the empirical data to back it up yet. Researchers will choose different roles when it comes to this,” says Jesper Strömbäck.
He sees it as his role as a researcher to take a stand in favour of liberal democracy and its component parts.
“We now know quite well that the main threat to contemporary democracies is not the violent seizing of power, but that people are elected in democratically correct ways and, once in power, they use democratic means to circumvent and restrict democracy.”
Strömbäck therefore believes that he and other researchers need to apply knowledge from other countries to Sweden.
“Not just wait for democracy to be undermined here before we can say that it has happened here too.”
But nowadays, being a researcher can place you in a vulnerable position. This brings us back to the importance of academic freedom in a democracy. In Sweden, this is institutionally weak.
“Democracy, more than other form of governance, is very much based on norms that we are not really aware of until someone violates them. But precisely because they are norms, it is quite easy to trample on them, and the reactions are not as strong as if you were to change the constitution,” says Jesper Strömbäck.
SULF, the Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions and the Swedish National Union of students are therefore working together to have academic freedom constitutionally protected in Sweden. So far, they have not been successful in their lobbying of the government.
Disinformation, misinformation and knowledge resistance
Disinformation is false or misleading information that is spread deliberately and with the aim of misleading, while misinformation is spread unconsciously and without intention. Awareness and intention are difficult to prove and not always relevant, and therefore the term ’false and misleading information’ is increasingly used.
Misleading information may contain truth, but be biased, selectively chosen or presented in a way that distorts the meaning.
Knowledge resistance means rejecting, questioning or denying knowledge despite clear evidence.
