Echo Chambers and Empty Streets: The Civic Cost of Disinformation
Disinformation increasingly targets NGOs and grassroots movements, undermining their credibility and legitimacy. By recycling xenophobic, anti-scientific, and conspiracy narratives, such campaigns can delegitimize legitimate protest, instrumentalize social movements for other political purposes, and open space for extremist actors. Whether centrally coordinated or not, they gain traction only when they tap into anti-democratic belief systems that already exist among parts of the population in Western societies, exploiting these attitudes as entry points to weaken democratic resilience from within.
