Tackling online disinformation at the institutional and societal level

Disinformation has become an increasing concern for European policymakers and the broader public, raising pressing questions about safeguarding political discourse and institutional trust in an evolving digital landscape. This focus paper begins by mapping the current landscape of disinformation policies within the European Union, including public and private regulatory approaches. While significant efforts have been made— particularly in targeting foreign information manipulation—we argue that existing policy frameworks overlook important aspects of how disinformation works. Above all, there is a lack of attention to the issue of credibility: how individuals determine whether information is trustworthy and what role identity cues play in their assessments.

To address this gap, we conducted a survey experiment to understand how young people evaluate the credibility of online content. The experiment involved 152 university students at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Respondents were sorted into different groups based on their self-identified gender and country of origin at the beginning of the survey. They were then asked to assess the credibility of a series of social media posts covering a range of topics. Finally, respondents were invited to reflect in writing on the reasons behind their evaluations, allowing us to compare quantitative trust ratings with qualitative reasoning.

Our findings confirm that content quality remains the strongest predictor of perceived credibility. However, they also reveal that subtle identity cues—such as a shared gender or national background between the respondent and the post’s author—exert a small but consistent influence on trust evaluations. These effects often occur below the level of conscious awareness, suggesting that social proximity and identity alignment can shape how people perceive truth, even when they believe they are evaluating content objectively. Notably, the results also challenge some common assumptions: posts from authors with Anglo-American names, often associated with epistemic authority, were not rated as more credible, and male-presenting sources were not favored over female-presenting ones.

Taken together, our findings underline that perceived credibility of information is not a fixed quality but shaped by content, identity, and situational cues. Disinformation policies may therefore fall short if they do not account for these more subjective dynamics of trust.