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In response to disinformation projected by authoritarian regimes and antagonistic actors, states and institutions implement various countermeasures to fortify the information space. This includes warnings and educational efforts. Paradoxically, such information, meant to counter disinformation, can render people excessively vigilant and skeptical of reliable information. Can this be avoided? This study assesses the idea that framing unreliable information as a foreign threat can enhance the effectiveness of media literacy training while reducing the risk of excessive skepticism toward trustworthy sources. The authors tested two media literacy training videos in a preregistered randomized controlled experiment with a between-subjects design, using a nationally representative sample of the Swedish population (N = 1054). One video focused on source criticism without referencing external threats, while the other focused on the problem of disinformation from foreign actors, specifically Russia. Unlike findings from the U.S., the results show that both experimental groups improved their ability to identify unreliable information without becoming more distrustful of credible information from domestic media, public service outlets, and government agencies. The group exposed to the external threat narrative demonstrated the highest level of discernment and greatest trust in credible information. These findings offer reason for cautious optimism about the potential of media literacy training. The article ends by problematizing the findings and suggesting avenues for future research.

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.

Authoritarian governments have a history of interfering in the internal information space of democratic states, particularly in relation to national elections. In response to the spread of foreign disinformation, states and organizations have implemented various countermeasures, ranging from bans on outlets and platform regulation to fact-checking initiatives and digital media literacy education. The efficacy of such educational interventions could benefit from being tailored to the varying susceptibilities of different audiences. Previous research on audience differences has primarily highlighted cognitive factors, political orientation, and media consumption as determinants of susceptibility to disinformation, while findings related to demographic influences remain inconclusive. We recently conducted an experimental study in Sweden (n = 1,054) assessing the effects of two video-based media literacy interventions (Wagnsson et al. (2025)). In this study, we repurpose said data to examine demographic predictors of ‘discernment skills’ – the ability to differentiate between reliable news and disinformation. We included two types of educations, one focusing on disinformation in general and one emphasizing the problems with adversarial foreign disinformation. Our findings indicate that both versions enhanced the participants’ skills, and that discernment abilities were associated with being younger, more educated, and male. We provide potential explanations for these correlations and offer recommendations for future research.

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.

Rising loneliness in the Western world has weakened social networks and reduced interpersonal trust. Concurrently, malign information influence (MII) has become more pervasive. Albin Östervall and Charlotte Wagnsson synthesise literature from multiple fields to argue that loneliness may heighten susceptibility to MII, and that Russia, as a key disseminator of MII, is both exploiting and exacerbating Western loneliness. They explore how these dynamics impact personal and societal MII resilience.

The reach of illiberal international propaganda outlets rests on citizens in democratic countries as recipients and potential disseminators. However, little research has scrutinised the audiences for such platforms. Why do audiences in democratic states consume content from such outlets, and how far do they actually align with it ideologically? The present research seeks to address this gap. Building on and extending the recent research findings of a large-scale survey, interviews with Swedish media consumers were conducted between 23 March and 13 April 2022, providing a unique close-up on a group of media consumers who stated that they consumed, among other alternative media, the Russian state-sponsored media outlets RT and Sputnik as part of their media diet. The findings, elicited through interviews and the Q-sort method, challenge previous research that presents this audience in a one-dimensional way. First, we investigate their alignment with different political narratives, identifying three different profiles. Although only one profile generally aligned with the RT/Sputnik messaging, almost all the participants appreciate the content and share it on social media. Secondly, we examine their rationale for consumption, revealing a diverse array of motivations, and leading us to theorise four distinct consumption profiles: Distant Observers, Reluctant Consumers, Media Nihilists and Establishment Critics. We interpret these results and discuss their broader implications, before reflecting on the complexities of characterising audiences consuming authoritarian international broadcasting.

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 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.