Countering Disinformation as Community Resilience

Testing a Local-Level Assessment Framework

Bibliographic Data

ID24236988
AuthorsChrister Pursiainen (0000-0001-5611-1701, Department of Technology and Safety (ITS), The Arctic University of Norway (UiT), Tromsø, Norway), Bjarte Rød (Department of Technology and Safety (ITS), The Arctic University of Norway (UiT), Tromsø, Norway)
Year2026
Publication date2026-10-18
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAlternatives Global Local Political (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0304-3754 • E-ISSN: 2163-3150
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/03043754261491113
OpenAlexW7222897350
LanguageEN
References cited33

Disinformation has become a systemic challenge to democratic governance, eroding trust, weakening social cohesion, and complicating the work of public institutions. This article reframes the issue as a question of community resilience and examines how such resilience can be assessed at the local level. Building on resilience theory and indicator-based methodology, it develops a maturity-model framework across four domains: policy, governance, and regulation; education and public awareness; technology; and media, communication, and information. The framework is explored in a pilot/diagnostic study involving two related Norwegian local-governance respondent settings: elected councilors in one anonymized municipality and administrative respondents from a broader municipal sample. Across both settings, the results indicate a broadly similar pattern: communication-related capacities are more developed than educational, participatory, and technologically advanced ones, while resilience remains uneven and only partly institutionalized overall. Conceptually, the study links disinformation research to community-resilience theory; methodologically, the instrument should be understood as a governance-oriented diagnostic framework for assessing and comparing the maturity of local countermeasures.

Community resilience · countermeasures · Democratic governance · Disinformation · Local governance · Local government · maturity model · public awareness · resilience assessment framework · resilience indicators · social cohesion · technology capacity · Trust · Disaster Management and Resilience · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Public Relations and Crisis Communication

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Open DOIOpen Access