The lessons we already learned...and forgot to share

Credit: atakan, istock

This past month I have been working with academics on the challenge of disinformation against science. It has been genuinely illuminating. Not because it has given me a chance to get under the hood of many theoretical frameworks that were unknown, but practically very familiar, but because of what became increasingly obvious the deeper we went.

We have been here before. We just called it something different.

A decade and a half ago, the counter-terrorism field went through exactly the same intellectual journey that many in the science community are now doing. It started where the counter-disinformation space is now: focused almost entirely on detection, disruption, and interdiction. Identify the harmful content. Attribute it to its producers. Remove it, counter it, prosecute it where possible. It took years of painful experience, and some honest academic challenge, to establish what now seems obvious in retrospect. You cannot arrest your way out of an ideology. Susceptibility to extremist narratives is not an information deficit. It is a relationship problem, a values problem, a trust problem. And durable responses require trusted messengers, community legitimacy, and a positive-narrative that speaks to the same unmet needs that the extremist offer exploits.

That intellectual consensus was hard won. It reshaped CONTEST, it underpinned Prevent in its better iterations, it drove CVE programming across Europe and beyond. It was imperfect in practice, contested politically, and never fully resourced. But the intellectual case was made, and the field moved.

That knowledge has not crossed the disciplinary boundary into the counter-FIMI and pro-democracy space.

And as the EU's Democracy Shield comes online, as Europe begins to build what could be a genuinely transformative institutional architecture for democratic resilience, that failure of knowledge transfer matters enormously.

Here is what the CT field learned that the counter-disinformation world has not yet absorbed.

Susceptibility is not ignorance. The populations most exposed to disinformation are not in general people who lack access to accurate information. They are people whose trust in the institutions that produce and validate that information has been systematically eroded, deliberately, over many years. Fact-checking does not reach them, not because the facts are wrong, but because the institution doing the checking is the institution they no longer trust. We knew this about radicalisation (and still struggled to enact it) We are being even slower to apply it to disinformation.

The battle is not over facts. It is over the terrain in which facts are received. Strategic disinformation has shifted decisively from categorical false claims which can be identified and corrected, to the manufacture of doubt, delay, and complexity (especially in areas around scientific fact, like climate-science). It does not need to persuade people of falsehoods. It needs only to make truth feel contested, irrelevant, or tainted. Against that kind of operation, correction is the wrong weapon. We learned in the CT space that counter-narrative has to be proactive, values-grounded, and delivered before the hostile narrative has established itself in the community's interpretive framework. The counter-FIMI space is still overwhelmingly reactive.

Trusted messengers are not a tactical nicety. They are the precondition of everything else. The question of who specific communities are prepared to receive information from — and why — is prior to any question about what to communicate. In the CT space this eventually drove sustained investment in community engagement, in identifying and supporting credible voices within affected communities, in building the social relationships through which epistemic authority is actually negotiated. The counter-FIMI space has no equivalent infrastructure. It has platform governance, attribution analysis, and fact-checking networks. It does not have a trusted messenger architecture built from evidence about how different communities construct and contest credibility.

Why hasn't this crossed over? Partly it is institutional. The bodies leading counter-FIMI work are security and regulatory agencies, not the community resilience and social cohesion bodies that eventually drove P/CVE practice. Partly it is political. Proactive pro-democracy communication makes European institutions nervous about appearing to run their own influence operations, a tension the CT space never faced quite so acutely. Partly it is disciplinary. The counter-FIMI field has been dominated by network analysts, platform researchers, and political scientists, without the sustained engagement with social psychology, community practice, and normative political theory that eventually reshaped the CT approach.

And partly, this is the uncomfortable part, it is because the institutions that have built significant capability around detection and attribution have structural incentives to frame the problem in ways that promote what they already do.

What the Democracy Shield needs to get right from the outset

The Democracy Shield represents an opportunity to build something different but only if it is designed around the demand side, not just the supply side. That means building a systematic evidence base about which communities are most susceptible to which disinformation narratives and why, grounded in values and trust configurations rather than just exposure data. It means investing in trusted messenger infrastructure at community level, built from that evidence rather than from intuition. It means developing a proactive narrative strategy that occupies the values terrain before hostile narratives arrive, rather than attempting to correct them after they have landed. And it means making the affirmative case for liberal democracy, what it actually offers people, why the comparative record matters, why its defence is worth the cost, with the same energy and conviction that its adversaries bring to undermining it.

The knowledge to do this exists. It was built, at considerable cost, in the counter-terrorism field over the past fifteen years. The task now is not to reinvent it. It is to carry it across the disciplinary boundary, adapt it to a different but structurally similar challenge, and build it into an institutional architecture before the Democracy Shield hardens around the wrong assumptions.

We have done this before. We know how. The question is whether we will choose to apply what we learned.