In terms of challenges, in academic literature the focus has been on the spread of disinformation and its impact on elections. We found in our research that disinformation isn't just experienced between the start and the end of an election cycle. It's an everyday experience, by virtue of our digital participation in these digital spaces.
The challenges are that there are often a few buckets recommended for solutions and responses to countering disinformation. One bucket falls under what we call the legal regulatory framework. This is using regulatory mechanisms to reduce the encounter—the spread of disinformation online. For private spaces, this creates unique challenges, because these are inherently private spaces in which people are sharing information, with the expectation of some privacy.
In liberal democracies, we have the benefits of individual rights and civil liberties, so we don't necessarily want to erode trust by having government intervening in these digital spaces. It also creates a challenge in that, because of their closed and encrypted nature, you can't collect data at scale, so it's harder to know what's happening in these spaces. This often produces unique considerations around research design.
The other kind of intervention that's often recommended for countering disinformation is technological. This is content moderation—slapping something online that says the content is false. This is also trickier in private digital spaces. These things can be interpreted ambiguously.
For example, in WhatsApp, something can be “forwarded many times”. In our research, we found that “forwarded many times” is interpreted differently by different groups of users. Younger users would often use that as one of the cognitive shortcuts to signal that this is junk information coming in. Older users would often use that flag as a way to interpret that information as higher quality.
Technological interventions are also limited. This is why, in our work, we've really pushed and advocated for a bottom-up approach. These digital spaces are hard to govern through legal mechanisms and through technological mechanisms. What you really need is a bottom-up, grassroots, civil society role in which you're building trust, inoculation and prebunking at the individual level. This is the opportunity.