The Geography of Disinformation
If you were to plot the spread of a viral disinformation campaign on a map, it would not look random. It would look like a heat map of existing social fractures: communities with declining economic prospects, regions where institutional trust has already eroded, areas where local journalism has been gutted and information vacuums have formed. Disinformation does not create divisions. It occupies them.
This is the finding of a multi-year research collaboration between Oxford University’s Internet Institute and the University of Amsterdam, and it has significant implications for how we think about the problem — and how we might address it.
Anatomy of a False Narrative
The researchers tracked seventeen distinct disinformation campaigns across eleven countries over three years. In each case, the false narrative had four consistent characteristics: it activated an existing grievance rather than fabricating a new one; it offered a simple causal explanation for a complex phenomenon; it identified a clear villain (an ethnic group, an institution, an ideology); and it was emotionally saturated — fear and contempt featured in over 80% of cases.
These are not sophisticated psychological tricks. They are, in fact, the oldest tricks in the demagogic playbook. What has changed is the delivery infrastructure — and the granularity with which false narratives can now be targeted.
Micro-Targeting the Fracture Lines
Modern disinformation campaigns, particularly those with state or well-resourced private backing, do not broadcast uniformly. They use the same data layers that legitimate digital advertisers use — demographic, psychographic, behavioral — to identify communities that are predisposed to receive specific narratives. A message about immigration criminality is routed to communities with recent demographic change. A narrative about economic betrayal is directed at regions with elevated unemployment and deindustrialization.
This is not hypothetical. Investigations by the Stanford Internet Observatory and the EU’s European External Action Service have documented coordinated campaigns with these precise characteristics originating from state-linked actors. The campaigns are not crude propaganda. They are precision instruments.
The Information Vacuum Problem
Perhaps the most striking finding of the Oxford-Amsterdam research is the role of local news deserts. In communities where local journalism has been reduced or eliminated, disinformation campaigns achieve significantly greater penetration and persistence. Without local reporters to contest false narratives with accurate, contextually grounded reporting, false information fills the void.
This is a structural problem with a structural solution — one that requires investment in local journalism infrastructure rather than purely technological countermeasures. Fact-checking organizations and platform content moderation are necessary but insufficient. They operate downstream of a problem that originates in information deprivation.
What Resilience Looks Like
Communities that proved most resilient to disinformation in the study shared several characteristics. They had functioning local news ecosystems. They had higher rates of media literacy education. And, perhaps counterintuitively, they had higher rates of interpersonal trust — not institutional trust, which was often low, but trust in neighbors and community members.
This suggests that the antidote to an information war fought on geographic fault lines is not only better information. It is the repair of the social fabric that disinformation exploits. That repair is slow, expensive, and resistant to technological solution.
Which is, of course, precisely why it is so rarely undertaken.
Dmitri Koslov is Datum’s political correspondent. He covers information warfare and electoral integrity.