The Tender Trap: Why EU Counter-Disinformation Funding Keeps Missing the Mark

Every few months, Brussels issues calls for proposals aimed to tackle disinformation amongst Europeans. The budgets are substantial. The rhetoric is urgent. The requirements are specific: broad geographic coverage, partnerships with fact-checkers and/or media, engaging content creation, measurable impact, delivery within tight timeframes.

These efforts are genuine and necessary. The problem is not lack of commitment or resources. The problem is that the entire architecture of how institutions commission counter-disinformation work is fundamentally misaligned with what would actually address root causes, leaving Europe perpetually responding to symptoms, whilst the underlying disease strengthens.

Awareness Without Understanding

Disinformation succeeds because it meets deep emotional needs that truthful institutional communication currently fails to satisfy - there are many arguments and reasons why that is, but in short,  people believe conspiracy theories not because they lack critical thinking skills, but because those theories provide simple explanations for their economic precarity, offer belonging in communities that validate their anxieties, and grant a satisfaction of possessing knowledge that powerful elites supposedly want hidden.

Yet grant specifications frame the challenge primarily as an awareness and literacy deficit. They ask for campaigns to raise awareness about information integrity risks and content that helps young people identify and counter threats. The diagnosis is that young Europeans don’t know enough or think carefully enough. The prescription is more information, delivered more engagingly.

This is not to say these approaches are not having any effect, but after a decade of media literacy initiatives and fact-checking operations, disinformation continues spreading amongst precisely those populations these efforts aim to protect. The model addresses information deficits without touching the emotional and structural conditions that make disinformation compelling in the first place.

The Deliverables Paradox

Tender requirements demand concrete, measurable outputs: number of content pieces created, influencers engaged, audiences reached, impact evaluated by project end. These specifics provide accountability and allow comparison between proposals. They also inevitably push towards breadth over depth. And if we agree that disinformation is not declining then it is questionable if these criteria have led to success. 

Consider what’s actually required to understand why disinformation resonates in a specific cultural context. You need months of ethnographic research (or insight from such research) into material conditions creating vulnerability and what about the current disinfo works. You need deep partnerships with communities built through patient relationship-building. You need willingness to discover that institutional policies themselves create credibility gaps that disinformation exploits, then capacity to influence those policies.

None of this produces neat quarterly reports detailing content output and audience reach. The tender structure naturally incentivises measurable activity over meaningful change. Projects deliver impressive statistics whilst changing little about how young Europeans encounter information or experience the real world as they go about their daily lives. This isn’t failure so much as misdirection of genuine effort towards addressing symptoms rather than causes.

Almost every counter-disinformation tender emphasises reach: content must be disseminated widely to audiences of millions. The logic seems sound. Disinformation spreads widely, so counter-narratives must spread equally widely to compete.

But disinformation doesn’t succeed through raw reach. It succeeds through touching a few trusted messengers who then speak to their receptive audiences in culturally fluent ways about issues that matter to their lived experience. A conspiracy theory persuades not because millions see it, but because the right people see it from sources they trust in contexts where it confirms what they already suspect, and then spread it. 

The dominant framework positions counter-disinformation work as responsive: monitor for false narratives, then create corrections or alternatives. The very term counter is a problem. Even sophisticated proposals moving beyond fact-checking towards narrative creation typically frame themselves as developing responses to disinformation campaigns.

This accepts permanent strategic disadvantage. Disinformation actors test dozens of narratives simultaneously by dumping content online then amplify what resonates, and address emerging anxieties immediately - much dies with no impact at all. By the time funded projects identify emerging false narratives, complete stakeholder consultations, develop creative responses, and finalise deliverables, those narratives have either faded or entrenched.

What’s needed is proactive narrative infrastructure addressing emotional needs before manipulation occurs. Citizens should encounter compelling truthful stories about economic agency, democratic participation, and cultural identity so regularly that when simplistic false alternatives emerge, they already possess better frameworks for making sense of experience. The trick is that this cannot come from political voices. Neutral voices are almost non-existent, everyone has an agenda. 

But we have to try. Building such an approach requires long-term investment in institutions and creators constantly producing emotionally resonant truthful content, not because they’re responding to specific threats but because they’re serving ongoing community needs. Tender structures demanding demonstration that specific interventions addressed specific threats with measurable outcomes within tight timeframes make truly proactive work difficult to fund or sustain. Such an ask means each and every output has to work, which it can’t. There is a critical temporal mismatch between project cycles and the effort needed, and whilst improving, difficulties in cross pollination between projects. 

The work happens, reports document activity, but real change emerges only after projects end and formal evaluation concludes. The gap between what’s promised and what’s possible isn’t dishonesty so much as structural inevitability given temporal constraints.

A Path Forward

Current tender systems don’t prevent counter-disinformation work. They shape it in ways that privilege response over defence, breadth over depth, and measurable activity over structural change. This critique doesn’t mean good work cannot happen within current structures. The challenge for practitioners committed to genuinely addressing disinformation is working strategically within these constraints whilst advocating for their evolution.

Success lies not in refusing imperfect structures but in understanding limitations clearly enough to work strategically within them. This means being honest internally about what’s achievable whilst demonstrating externally how proposals serve tender objectives. It means building genuine partnerships before applications rather than assembling convenient consortia once they emerge. It means having expertise and relationships to deliver depth where it matters whilst satisfying breadth requirements where necessary.

Until commissioning institutions develop structures better aligned with addressing root causes, practitioners face an ongoing challenge: extract resources from imperfect systems and deploy them towards work genuinely serving Europeans navigating information ecosystems designed to manipulate. That remains possible, but only through clear-eyed understanding of structural misalignment and strategic commitment to using available resources for building the proactive narrative infrastructure and deep community relationships that might actually shift how information is encountered and evaluated, even when formal evaluation measures something else entirely.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​