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Efforts to raise awareness about foreign disinformation might accidentally increase distrust towards legitimate media. We argue that state discourse on disinformation is comparable to strategic framing in journalists’ coverage of political events, and that it might imbue audiences with cynicism. Furthermore, in contrast to an experimental paradigm that depicts disinformation audiences as passive, we suggest that news consumers actively appropriate and produce content themselves. Conceptualising media content as ‘strategic’ rather than sincere might influence audiences to share and produce media content strategically. This Machiavellian tendency leads to similar effects on bias as motivated reasoning. Most accounts of motivated reasoning assume that limits of psychological processing are the reasons for biased judgements of what is true and fake, however, we argue that biases can also be due to culturally acquired second-order beliefs about knowledge. To explain this, we build on ideas about ‘folk epistemology’ and propose the term ‘strategic epistemology towards media’. Resistance-building efforts against disinformation risk promoting such a strategic epistemology towards media and this can have harmful effects on democratic dialogue. To avoid this, educational interventions should be premised on social epistemology rather than experimental psychology.

Although concern about the effects of international audiences consuming Russian state-sponsored media has been expressed, little empirical research examines this. The current study asks how audiences in Latvia respond to narratives projected by Sputnik Latvia – a Kremlin-financed news outlet. We begin a tripartite methodological approach with an analysis of the types of narratives the outlet projects. We then test how ethnic Latvian and Russian-speaking participants in Latvia respond to destruction narratives that portray Latvia as “failing,” the most prominent type in our analysis. We use two survey experiments that test an existing hypothetical mediation model predicting an array of affective and trust responses. We find evidence that exposure to destruction narratives triggered largely similar responses in both groups; however, exploratory analyses and post-survey focus groups are used to show that their motivations may be different. We conclude by discussing potential reasons for these differences, and the ramifications of these results.

The EU views malign information influence (MII) as a threat, and this has been enhanced with the Russian invasion of Ukraine resulting in a ban on several Russian media. This article adds to research on the dilemmas of democracies in combatting MII, by consulting the public on whether the ban was a proportionate and effective measure and if it stained the EU’s moral authority. Combining focus groups with a survey of the Swedish population, we found robust support for the ban – slightly stronger among women and increasing with age – and little backlash towards the EU. Respondents supported active countermeasures yet recognised problems with curtailing the free flow of information. The results indicate a need for refinement of an ideal-type model of countermeasures to MII (Hellman and Wagnsson Citation2017). We suggest a new category – “fortifying” – that highlights shared state/individual responsibility and the strengthening of citizens, authorities and the media. We conclude by suggesting a need for additional research on how to balance values of freedom and security and whether public support of bans relies on the precarious geopolitical situation resulting from the Russian invasion of Ukraine or if securitisation of information is an enduring trend.

The effects of exposure to Russian propaganda have long been feared; however, academic research examining responses is scarce. This study aims to investigate the responses of Russian speakers in Latvia to a narrative propagated by the Kremlin-sponsored media outlet Sputnik Latvia that narrates Latvian government policy as Russophobic. The potential to entrench existing ethnopolitical divisions has been highlighted as a possible effect of Russian speakers consuming this narration. We adopt a comprehensive, mixed-method research approach, where we first provide an analysis of the content of Sputnik Latvia's Russophobia narrative in its recent output. Then, using this analysis, we examine how Russian-speaking participants respond to this content in a preregistered survey experiment and a focus group. Theoretically, we orient around the rejection-identification model. This predicts individuals to generally experience lower well-being after perceiving group-based discrimination, but that embracing the stigmatized identity can help maintain well-being despite this perceived devaluation. Our results showed that even brief exposure to Sputnik Latvia's Russophobia narrative led to higher levels of perceived discrimination and group identification in Russian speakers. However, we found no significant effects on well-being, which deviates from extant literature on discrimination. We discuss the reasons for this and suggest future directions.

Russia utilizes state-sponsored news media outlets, such as RT or Sputnik, to project antagonistic strategic narratives into targeted societies and perturb international audiences. While psychological responses to this conduct are frequently assumed, there is a lack of causal evidence demonstrating this. Using a transdisciplinary perspective, we conducted four survey experiments that tested two path models predicting possible cognitive and emotional responses to two narrative strategies that Russian state-sponsored media employ: destruction, which portrays a state as weak and chaotic, and suppression, which portrays a state as indecent and morally deviant. The experiments had between-participant designs, where participants read either an article demonstrating a strategy or a control text, and then indicated their responses to several trust and emotional variables. Participants were either Swedish or Dutch citizens, to build on previous analyses of Russian narration about Sweden and The Netherlands. Path analyses revealed significant differences between the conditions on several response variables. However, we found no evidence that these effects were mediated by generalized realistic or symbolic threat perceptions. We contribute preliminary insights into potential causal links between Russian antagonistic narrative strategies and specific psychological responses. This study, and its overarching research agenda, should have implications for practitioners seeking to counter Russian information influence.

‘Othering’ – the view or treatment of another person or group as intrinsically different from and alien to oneself – is a central concept in the International Relations literature on identity construction. It is often portrayed as a fairly singular and predominantly negative form of self/Other differentiation. During the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sweden at first glance emerged as exactly such a negative Other. This article problematises such a view of Othering. Departing from a narrative analysis of news reporting on Sweden’s management of COVID-19 in the United States, Germany and the Nordic states, the article proposes an ideal type model with four forms of Othering – emotional, strategic, analytic and nuanced – not recognised in previous research. These types differ in their treatment of the Other as more or less significant and in involving a more or less self-reflexive construction of the self. Although narratives in all these settings drew on previously established narratives on Sweden, they followed different logics. This has implications for our understanding of Sweden as an Other in the time of COVID-19, as well as of self/Other relations in International Relations more broadly.

International Relations (IR) scholars have theorized the significance of communication and messaging across state borders, using notions such as soft power, sharp power, propaganda and illiberal communication. This study contributes to this body of research by investigating narrative persuasiveness by way of a large-scale experimental exploration of narrative reception. The projection of strategic narratives has become a central feature of modern influencing across borders. Despite the existence of a growing literature on the potentially harmful effects of such narratives, however, their persuasiveness remains under-researched. This article seeks to help fill this gap by asking what might induce people in Sweden to side with strategic narratives projected by Sputnik, the Russian state-funded news media platform. The article puts a central component of Walter Fisher’s classic narrative paradigm to the test: the notions of narrative probability (consistency and coherence) and fidelity (previous life experience). In a rare large-scale survey experiment (N = 2,032), three narratives from Sputnik were presented to respondents to establish the potential perceived narrative probability and fidelity. Contrary to Fisher’s argument and some previous works on strategic narratives, the results show that people can be persuaded by a narrative without having personal experience of the topic, and despite regarding the text as incoherent. This indicates that information influence projected through strategic narratives can be effective regardless of the form of the message and even when introducing unfamiliar ideas. This is an interesting addition to findings in previous studies that source awareness does not negatively affect the effectiveness of strategic narratives. The article ends by highlighting contributions to previous research on persuasion and by suggesting avenues ahead.

Russian information influence as an enduring threatOn February 27 2022, the EU announced that it would ban the Russian state-sponsoredplatforms RT and Sputnik from the European media space. The controversialreaction demonstrates that European politicians take the destructiveness ofauthoritarian states’ international broadcasting seriously. This article addresses thenature of the threat, conceptualised as ‘malign information influence’ (MII): informationsponsored by authoritarian regimes or other hostile actors and projectedthrough international broadcasting outlets across borders. The article exploresreactions to Russian information influence and outlines key problems that it cancause, above all polarisation and the undermining of trust, media and democracy.It exemplifies Russian information influence towards the Ukraine and a number ofother states and exposes different channels, strategies and techniques. Effects arebriefly discussed. The article’s key argument is that information influence shouldnot be reduced to a problem of sudden ‘campaigns’ or ‘operations’. It is an enduring,long term, threat.

This article examines the reception and dissemination of ‘maligninformation influence’ (MII) in a liberal democracy; informationsponsored by authoritarian regimes or other hostile actors andprojected through international broadcasting outlets acrossborders. The study contributes to the scarce research on thereception of narratives transmitted by the Russian statesupported media platforms RT and Sputnik, exposingcharacteristics, political attitudes, and sharing behaviors of RT/Sputnik consumers. A nationwide, representative survey (n: 3033)from November 2020 revealed a surprisingly high number ofSwedish RT/Sputnik consumers (7%), with an overrepresentationof young, men and supports of non-parliamentarian parties andthe right wing, nationalist Sweden Democratic Party. Theseconsumers are somewhat more willing than non-consumers todisseminate news on social media and in real life despite beingdistrustful of the sources. The findings strengthen previousresearch in demonstrating the attractiveness of identity grievancenarratives among alternative media consumers, yet the resultsshow that RT/Sputnik consumers also aligned with narratives thatcontrasts with national security policy. They state less trust inpoliticians, institutions, the media, news, and journalism, yet arecomparatively prone to share unreliable or untrue news contenton social media and in real life. The analysis thus identified asection of media consumers who can function as vehicles for thedissemination of MII. The article contributes to the underresearched problem of the potential of MII to take root andprovides a basis for future qualitative research that can refine andprovide nuance to the knowledge of reception of MII.

In this article we explore how Swedish citizens perceive security threats, and how threat perceptions overlap with ideology, trust and demographics. The results show that concerns over security threats are foremost connected to an authoritarian outlook. In addition, four typical groups of security orientations were identifed. On the one end of the spectrum, we found one group with anti-immigrant, anti-feminist and anti-egalitarian opinions and low confdence in media and institutions. At the other end, we identifed a group dominated by women with university degrees, who believe in egalitarian tolerance and display trust in societal institutions. Even though the findings are in line with previous research on the radical right globally, we were intrigued by the existence of a clearly defned group of respondents that oppose feminism to the extent that it is even seen as a security threat. This is particularly striking given that Sweden is thought of as one of the most equal countries in the world, with a government pursuing a feminist foreign policy.