Editorial [The Impact of Disinformation on European Public Institutions and Local or Regional Media: Mapping Strategies for Fact-Checking]

Rubén Rivas-de-Roca ^1* Concha Pérez Curiel ² José Rúas-Araújo ³

• ¹ University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
• ² University of Seville, Seville, Spain
• ³ University of Vigo, Vigo, Galicia, Spain

There is a growing academic concern over false information and their impact on the shaping of public opinion. Prior scholarship has shed light on the role of fact-checking as a solving practice (Westlund et al., 2024) or the impact of online disinformation on elections (Mauk and Grömping, 2024). Besides that, some local and regional European media outlets have developed media literacy projects to combat disinformation within their communities (Rúas-Araújo et al., 2023).The literature has examined the working of disinformation on topics such as climate change (García Santamaría et al., 2024) or the influence of this phenomenon in several media landscapes (Bradshaw et al., 2020;Giglietto et al., 2020). However, scant attention has been devoted to institutional responses to disinformation. This Research aimed to fill this gap through five articles. They all have a shared interest in the challenges triggered by disinformation in a digital context. First, in an article published in 2022, Fatema et al. (2022) ) conducted a quantitative analysis of the social media influence on the relationship between politicians and citizens, considering the moderating effect of political slogans. Based on a survey, the authors detected a positive and significant impact of social networks on politicians and citizens. The role of political slogans in the image building of political leaders is also highlighted. Hence, this contribution opens future avenues of research to study the positive relationships that politicians can make with the citizens.Nevertheless, the use of digital technologies has also negative implications. As stated, disinformation is one of the main problems and this led Quintas-Froufe et al. (2024) to explore the corporate policies applied by TikTok to protect young audiences against disinformation. As the audience exposure to disinformation on social media is huge, the article develops a longitudinal analysis (2020-2024) of these policies, the topics they deal with and how they are monitored. The paper reveals the increasing role of institutional communication or transparency in the framework of the European Digital Services Act (DSA), but it is still early to make a full assessment of these initiatives.Regarding the action of governments, Dragomir (2025) asks to what extent do governments fight or boost disinformation. Drawing upon a cross-country comparison analysis, the author unveils how laws and regulations against disinformation frequently curtail press freedom. This problem is bigger in authoritarian regimes or flawed democracies, but there is a worrying ripple effect of these practices. The line between instigators and regulators of disinformation is weak, threatening well-established democracies.Following the above, disinformation is also disseminated by political actors as illustrated by Domínguez-García et al. (2024). Their article focuses on interventions by members of the Congress of Deputies during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain. It is outstanding that the issue of disinformation was a minor topic on the Spanish political agenda, even though the selected time frame was marked by polarization. Terms such as lie, false, and hoax were preferred over disinformation or post-truth. The authors also found how health and economic frames were highly mentioned due to the pandemic. According to their results, it seems that disinformation is used as another element in the framework of confrontational political rhetoric, without a proper discussion on the measures needed to tackle this information.Lastly, Vázquez-Gestal et al. ( 2024) also address Spain, but with a focus on fact-checking practices as a solution. Specifically, they analyze the official YouTube channels of the health departments of all Spanish autonomous communities. The nature and strategies of videos are described, showing an increasing employment of YouTube to fight disinformation. Regional health authorities mostly resort to micro-videos in order to respond to fake news, specially aimed at patients. Messages against disinformation are produced both as a preventive measure or in response to existing contents.The five contributions to this Special Issue offer renewed approaches to disinformation within different media systems and political cultures. The role of citizens, fact-checkers, political actors, or digital platforms is examined in the fight against this problem. As stated, digital technologies have a vast range of possibilities, but the rise of disinformation requires counteractive strategies by public and private actors. On this matter, the importance of citizens or fact-checking initiatives should be acknowledged following a cross-territory perspective. This set of articles portrays an increasing field of research that seeks to further our understanding of the flow of disinformation and how to shape counteractive initiatives with impact at the local level. Future research could expand the scope of these works by focusing on the adoption of innovative tools like AI or the success of agreements between institutions and digital platforms, which are starting to combat this phenomenon in Europe thanks to DSA.