Stephan Lewandowsky: Disinformation, Misinformation, and the Fate of Democracy

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, democracy seemed destined to spread everywhere. Today, democracies worldwide are backsliding. In this talk I examine the role of misinformation in that decline. I describe how disinformation now manifests: as a blizzard of falsehoods, as the capture of public-health institutions, and as a “fantasy-industrial complex” that fractures shared reality. I then show how social media’s network effects, attention economy, and asymmetric algorithmic amplification favour low-quality and extreme content. But we are not helpless. I conclude with evidence-based countermeasures, from psychological inoculation at scale to platform redesign and European regulation.