Countering Disinformation as Community Resilience: Testing a Local-Level Assessment Framework

Abstract

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.