| Summary: | Western liberal democracies currently face a significant challenge from the growing proliferation of disinformation. With research suggesting that disinformation increases the risk of violence and intergroup conflict, this thesis sought to understand precisely what is being done by states to decrease the likelihood of this happening—specifically, with how the United Kingdom compares with/differs from Sweden in the type of resilience strategies employed to combat disinformation. To answer this question, this thesis conducted a qualitative comparative content analysis to examine government communications for the purposes of identifying, codifying, and describing the different types of resilience strategies combatting disinformation as practised by the United Kingdom and Sweden, to serve as a repository aid in future intervention planning. Utilising a bespoke analytical framework to make sense of resilience strategies of differing scales, a micro-macro perspective was adopted to capture (1) bottom-up focused strategies—which sought to enhance an individual’s ability to independently evaluate the accuracy of the information that they consume and (2) top-down focused strategies—which sought to reduce societal disinformation exposure through structural interventions. This thesis demonstrates that the United Kingdom and Sweden share approximately two-thirds of their disinformation resilience strategy with one another. From 472 items sourced from British and Swedish government communications, this study uncovered 15 micro strategies and 59 macro strategies in total—which, at face value, suggests a genuine bias in favour of a macro strategic resilience approach. To the degree that this is suitable for effective societal resilience against disinformation, remains inconclusive and warrants further research.
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