Far-right mobilization, Disinformation, and the Failure of Policy to Curb Democratic Crisis
After several nights working till 2am, I’ve just submitted a new article to a journal on how “disinformation” has come to dominate policy understandings of democratic crisis. My argument is that this is contributing to policymakers’ failure to tackle to the most pressing problem: far-right mobilization.
Consider a recent AI-generated music video funded by the far-right UK party ‘Advance UK’ which circulated widely on major streaming platforms. It features a nihilistic, white nationalist skinhead ‘Danny Bones’ walking through bleak English streets, through flag-waving crowds who confront the police, singing: “this is England, don’t ask why, why I’m England till I die.” The imagery is stark and confrontational. The music and accompanying video function as highly manipulative and rousing white nationalist propaganda.
While it is AI-generated and in that sense “fake,” the major harm here is not really from disinformation, but from the mobilization of grievance, and what makes it powerful is not falsehood but its ideological and emotional elements. This is highly effective propaganda.
That distinction points to something current policy debates around ‘disinformation’ struggle to capture.
Concerns about democratic backsliding and authoritarian mobilization have intensified across Europe, the United States, and beyond. Cross-national data indicate a sustained period of autocratization: according to the latest V-Dem report, around 74 percent of the world’s population now lives under autocratic rule, with more countries currently autocratizing than democratizing.
Today, UK Labour MP Liam Byrne revealed in research for a new book that more than £170 million flowed into a populist right “media-political complex” in the UK over the past five years. Much of this funding is underpinning the expansion of radical political organization, including media platforms and cultural infrastructure designed to shape public discourse. The problem therefore is not primarily about falsehood. It is about organized power and how it mobilizes ideology. The blinkered focus on lies is failing those who care about resisting fascism. This is precisely the kind of activity that falls out of focus when democratic crisis is framed mainly as disinformation. The emphasis on falsehood and information systems directs attention toward content and its circulation, while the organized production of propaganda and the infrastructures that sustain it remain less visible.
How democratic societies understand that threat shapes what responses are seen as necessary or legitimate for how we tackle the most important problem facing the world today.
Across governments, intergovernmental organizations, and major policy institutions, democratic crisis is increasingly framed in terms of disinformation. The underlying logic is consistent: the problem is falsehood, the mechanism is dysfunction within information systems, and the response is the governance of those systems. To some extent that’s reasonable. Falsehoods can be used to justify violence, they can affect people’s trust in medicine. With climate change they are existential.
In the article, I analyze a set of widely cited policy reports between 2017 and 2024. One of the most influential is the Council of Europe’s Information Disorder framework developed by Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan, which established the now-standard distinction between misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. It has been taken up across governments, international organizations, and frontline practice, shaping how institutions understand the problem and respond to it—from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s work on mis- and disinformation, to guidance from the UK College of Policing, to BBC Media Action’s approach to “tackling information disorder,” as well as informing European Commission policy.
What follows is not just a shift in terminology, but a shift in how the problem is organized and rendered acceptable for policy. The primary object of concern becomes falsehood and the information environments through which it circulates. Causal explanations emphasize system-level dynamics such as amplification and platform incentives. Proposed responses cluster around regulation, fact-checking, media literacy, and platform accountability.
A UNICRI report attributes the spread of extremist narratives to “vulnerabilities in the social media ecosystem.” A Chatham House report argues that online campaigning “distorts democratic processes” through algorithmic amplification and the strategic use of emotion. Political actors are present in these accounts, but they appear within systems rather than as the primary source of democratic threat.
In my research I found that, in policy documents, democratic crisis in the information sphere is organized around falsehood and information systems, while ideology and organized political actors recede from analytical priority.
The argument I make is not that politics disappears from these accounts, but that what is focused on follows a clear pattern that organizes organized power out of central focus. Anti-democratic mobilization is translated into the narrow language of falsehood, platform dynamics, or “information disorder,” and democratic defense is correspondingly organized as the governance of information environments seen as enabling these.
This makes the problem feel ‘manageable’... because false claims and information flows could be monitored, identified, regulated. “Information integrity” can be governed without appearing to adjudicate between competing political ideologies. But unfortunately the reality of organized power is repeatedly getting in the way.
And the ‘information disorder’ framework struggles to capture forms of anti-democratic politics that do not depend on straightforward falsity.
The far-right music video is just one example of how culture is being manufactured for nationalist and exclusionary politics internationally. A focus on falsehood does not fully capture how contemporary anti-democratic mobilization operates. Much of it works through narrative and symbolism, often drawing on emotion and identity. A framework centered on disinformation is not well equipped to register that kind of activity as a central problem, even when its political effects are unmistakable.
In political science, the term propaganda has long been used to analyze how communication operates as an instrument of power—how it mobilizes identity and grievance or sustains exclusionary worldviews. Propaganda doesn’t have to be false. And the acknowledges that it isn’t only falsehood that causes harm. But political science has not been the academic discipline having an impact on policy in this area. A wave of ‘disinformation’ literature emerged from communication studies and has largely dominated post-2016 policy on this.
In contemporary policy discourse, ‘propaganda’ is often treated as too vague, too pejorative, or too politically charged to be the basis of policy. So ‘disinformation’ is the focus, despite the fact this term often also faces these latter two charges. My research shows that frameworks that foreground ideology and organized political power therefore sit at the margins of a debate now dominated by concepts organized around falsity and system governance.
The result is a partial model of democratic defense that leaves us better equipped to counter falsehood than address complex and well-funded political projects. That matters because it shapes what gets attention and what does not. When democratic crisis is framed primarily as disinformation, responses are directed toward identifying, correcting, and managing falsehood. The far right’s organized production of propaganda, the actors behind it, and the infrastructures, ideas and narratives that sustain it fade into the background and remain unaddressed by policymakers.
Autocratization is therefore being built upon a wider pattern, where political movements invest in media, culture, and narrative to build support and reshape public discourse - and what makes them persuasive are appeals to values, cultural narrative and emotion.
Money flows to political actors and platforms, audiences are built, and messages that mobilize grievance and exclusion circulate widely - often leveraging more than falsehood. The falsehood may be there but is often not what makes it grow... people can even be aware the falsehoods are false and they are frequently secondary to why people engage with this propaganda.
Meanwhile, policy debates avoid focusing on these material realities. A debate centered on disinformation that leaves political and ideological dimensions of propaganda out of the policy discussion has given us an incomplete toolbox for addressing the growing democratic crisis. If policy debates are to rise to the challenge its essential to refocus the policy discussion on the organized power of the far right and how it mobilizes ideology to unpick democracy. This is what my work on this aims to do.