Beyond Disinformation: Identitarian Narratives Meet Authoritarian Practices, Lawfare and Marketcraft
About the project
What lies beyond disinformation?
Disinformation is now the status quo. Beyond the facts of the matter—false claims to be fact-checked or governmental narratives to be debunked—broader forces are shaping our everyday informational landscape. These forces reweight and reorder opportunities to speak, engage, express and represent oneself, limiting our capacity to know, understand, and participate in the world around us.
Identity matters as much to this landscape as facts. Repressive legal templates and restrictive economic interventions redefine how we individually or collectively participate in digital life. These changes leave only narrow openings—apertures that permit limited ways of belonging to collective, interpretive communities—while foreclosing so many other possibilities for public life.
By linking these domains of identity, authoritarianism, law and economics, this report demonstrates how such interventions reduce opportunities for local, transnational and global experiences of collective engagement to the strategic needs of governments or the competing commercial imperatives of platform and data economies.
We are media scholars, journalists, area experts and disinformation specialists, each contributing diverse skills and experiences to address the critical issues for fact-based journalism and democratic governance today. We seek to understand rapidly declining trust in liberal democratic institutions and surging populism worldwide while examining the fragmentation of the informational landscape and the polarization of public opinion, ultimately seeking to understand what underpins these shifts—What lies beyond disinformation?
Key findings
Identity
Across today’s information and media landscape shaped by polarizing political entertainment rather than genuine public discourse—and by social media platforms that amplify conflict while overwhelming spaces for political deliberation—identity is increasingly perceived in terms of isolation and disconnection. We compare how this environment has fostered new forms of collective victimhood that, while empowering and populist, are often rooted in dominant classes, including ethnonationalist majorities and gender, with “manhood” emerging forcefully as a perceived aggrieved identity.
In contrast, our survey of numerous diasporas worldwide reveals communities seeking to forge communicative spaces that reflect their identities, yet in the face of such social shifts, they often seek refuge in self-censorship. This constrains the effectiveness of how we speak about and represent ourselves, preventing local experiences and shared cultural memories from translating into opportunities for just and democratic participation.
Lawfare
Globally, there has been a rise in the use of laws, or more precisely, legal templates, as tools for authoritarian experimentation, entrenchment, and export. They are increasingly used to identify and isolate particular communities from participation in political and public life, targeted in a way that mobilizes and incites parts of the wider electorate.
The ambiguity of laws and the quasi-legal rhetoric of government officials play a significant role in populist politics by legitimizing wider state-led actions targeting marginalized communities. This situation creates opportunities for authoritarian legislative changes, the imposition of harsh criminal penalties, and their inconsistent and arbitrary application across all levels of society, allowing public responses to such actions to act as pretexts for additional laws.
Authoritarian practices
Repressive legal techniques often spread regionally and are shared among aligned illiberal regimes. However, they also circulate globally, initially through the rhetorical templates of disinformation actors in the media and then through the digital tactics of non-state actors working closely with governments to conduct surveillance, harassment and silencing of dissent.
Our analysis of several case studies shows that conventional labels such as ‘democratic’ or ‘autocratic’ can obscure how authoritarian practices operate across the political spectrum worldwide, undermining any attempts for accountability.
Marketcraft
Although terms such as ‘sanctions’, ‘supply chains’, and ‘digital sovereignty’ have only recently entered popular economic discourse—particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic and following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022—they represent just a few types of marketcraft. These tools are used to stop and dam the flow of economic power by legally crafting domestic industries to serve geopolitical goals.
In the race to dominate digital, data, and AI-driven economies, increasingly assertive policies are being implemented to impose controls and create divisions. This is fragmenting the global economy and producing various divergent information landscapes. Disinformation flourishes in the gaps between these emerging digital worlds—spaces increasingly defined by competition between states rather than connection between their citizens.
Policy implications
- Political engagement and informed participation are not limited to elections. They are everyday issues represented in social isolation at the scale of individual and socio-economic life. These issues must be addressed through interpersonal, community and employment opportunities—and by recognizing the impacts when such opportunities are lacking.
- Informational literacy must be mobilized at the national level as part of a comprehensive effort to build digital resilience that connects people beyond their individual information-seeking behaviours or labour market needs.
- Responsible newsmakers, fact-based content creators, educators and community leaders must expand their commitment to accountability. Disinformation flourishes when we fail to identify how persuasion, publicity, and packaging of information erode trust across economic and political life&emdash;while also recognizing the agenda-setting impact of disinformation when it monopolizes the news cycle.
- Rather than mirroring illiberal practices of repression and censorship, democratic governments must take seriously the creative and participatory potential of our diverse, digital lives—as essential to protecting public participation. When geopolitical, isolationist and market-driven regulatory practices across digital platforms permit non-state actors to limit the nature of public expression and engagement, authoritarian regimes are emboldened, and their techniques are more effective.
Contact information
Dr. Kenzie Burchell, University of Toronto, Principal Investigator
Dr. Jennifer Ross, University of Toronto, Co-Investigator
Professor Vera Tolz, University of Manchester, Co-Investigator
Dr. Sherry Yu, University of Toronto, Co-Investigator
Corresponding Author: Kenzie.Burchell@utoronto.ca
Read the full report
The full report can be read at: https://hdl.handle.net/1807/142554
Preferred Citation:
Burchell, K., Ross, J., Tolz, V., Yu, S., Amundson, J., Ding L., Forgacs, H., Kindarji, V., Korotaev, R., Markelov, M., Rodriguez, S., Scarff, S. & Zabalueva, A., with Hutchings S. and Conduit, D.(2025). Beyond Disinformation: Identarian Narratives meet Authoritarian Practices, Lawfare & Marketcraft. A Knowledge Synthesis and Policy Report. Universities of Toronto and Manchester.