Online First and Just Accepted Articles List
Open Essays and Researches

La disinformazione come minaccia per la democrazia in Italia. Crisi della fiducia e rischi della società digitale

Just Accepted
  • Antonella Coco,
  • Olimpia Affuso
Antonella Coco
CASD - SSU
Olimpia Affuso
Università della Calabria
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/cambio-19242

Published 2026-07-07

Keywords

  • Disinformation,
  • Democracy,
  • Trust,
  • Artificial Intelligence

How to Cite

Coco, A., & Affuso, O. (2026). La disinformazione come minaccia per la democrazia in Italia. Crisi della fiducia e rischi della società digitale. Cambio. Rivista Sulle Trasformazioni Sociali. https://doi.org/10.36253/cambio-19242

Copyright (c) 2026 Antonella Coco, Olimpia Affuso

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

This contribution analyses disinformation as a factor of vulnerability in contemporary democracies, focusing on the relationship between informational disorder, the erosion of trust and the weakening of democratic cohesion. It examines disinformation activities conducted by foreign state actors against Italy and investigates how institutional actors involved in monitoring and countering the phenomenon interpret and problematize them. The article argues that transformations in the digital media ecosystem reshape the cognitive and symbolic mechanisms through which trust, shared orientations and democratic legitimacy are produced.

The analysis combines scientific literature, national and supranational documentary sources, and qualitative evidence from semi-structured interviews with key informants in politics, defence, communication and research. The findings identify recurring dimensions: the framing of disinformation as a systemic, permanent and difficult-to-attribute threat; its effects on the credibility of information sources and institutional legitimacy; the governance difficulties it raises; and the preference for non-securitarian responses based on social resilience, critical capacities and cognitive security. The article also discusses the ambivalent role of artificial intelligence, both as an amplifier of disinformation and as a possible countermeasure, while stressing the limits of purely technological solutions. Overall, informational disorder emerges not only as the circulation of false content, but as a broader condition of informational hypertrophy that opens multiple access points for strategic manipulation and deepens confusion in public opinion.

Just Accepted

References

  1. Affuso O., Coco A., Big Data: a challenge for social sciences. Criticisms for social knowledge and politics, in «Central European Political Science Review», vol. 20, n. 76, pp. 93–109.
  2. Altheide D. L., Snow R. P. (1979), Media Logic, Beverly Hills (CA):Sage Publications.
  3. Antinori A. (2023), Disinformazione e propaganda russa in Occidente, in Casini E., Manciulli A. (a cura di), La guerra tiepida. Il conflitto ucraino e il futuro dei rapporti tra Russia e Occidente, Roma:, pp. 123–136.
  4. Bail C. A. et al., Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization, in «Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”, vol. 115, pp. 9216–9221, 2018.
  5. Bender E. M., Gebru T., McMillan-Major A., Shmitchell S. (2021), On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?, in «Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency”, pp. 610–623.
  6. Bentivegna S., Boccia Artieri G. (2021), Voci della democrazia. Il futuro del dibattito pubblico, Bologna: il Mulino.
  7. Bonfanti M. E. (2021), Impiego offensivo di contenuti digitali, in Gori U., Vernon De Mars D. (a cura di), Cyber Warfare 2019–2020. Dall’evoluzione della Warfare alla resilienza al Covid-19, Milano: Franco Angeli, pp. 125–138.
  8. Cassidy J. (2021), How post-truth politics transformed and shaped the outcome of the 2016 Brexit referendum, in Piras S., Giusti E. (Eds.), Democracy and Fake News. Information Manipulation and Post-Truth Politics, London–New York: Routledge, pp. 53–63.
  9. Chadwick A. (2013), The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
  10. Cinelli M. et al. (2020), The COVID-19 social media infodemic, in «Scientific Reports», vol. 10, pp. 1–10..
  11. Comai G. (2021), Responding to alleged Russian interference by focussing on the vulnerabilities that make it possible, in Giusti S., Piras E. (Eds.), Democracy and Fake News. Information Manipulation and Post-Truth Politics, London–New York: Routledge, pp. 143–154.
  12. Costabile A. (2002), Il potere politico, Roma: Carocci.
  13. Cusumano E., Corbe M. (Eds.) (2018), A Civil-Military Response to Hybrid Threats, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  14. Del Vicario M. et al., The spreading of misinformation online, in «Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences», vol. 113, pp. 554–559, 2016.
  15. Deutsch K. W. (1972), I nervi del potere, Milano: Etas Kompass.
  16. Di Pasquale M., Germani L. S. (2023), Dizinformaija e misure attive, Research Paper, Istituto Gino Germani di Scienze Sociali e Studi Strategici.
  17. Edelman (2022), Trust Barometer, https://www.edelman.com/trust/2022-trust-barometer
  18. European Commission (2018), Action Plan against Disinformation, Joint Communication to EU institutions.
  19. Floridi L. (2017), La quarta rivoluzione. Come l’infosfera sta cambiando il mondo, Milano, Raffaello Cortina.
  20. Germani L. S. (2017), La minaccia della disinformazione, in Germani L. S. (a cura di), Disinformazione e manipolazione delle percezioni, Roma: Eurilink University Press.
  21. Giglietto F., Iannelli L., Valeriani A., Rossi L. (2019), “Fake news” is the invention of a liar..., in «Current Sociology», vol. 67, n. 4, pp. 625–642.
  22. Giungato L., Taddei L., Affuso O., Measuring Fabulation in Russo-Ukrainian War Online Narratives, in «Italian Sociological Review», pp. 575–601.
  23. Giusti S., Piras E. (Eds.) (2021), Democracy and Fake News. Information Manipulation and Post-Truth Politics, London–New York: Routledge.
  24. Gusfield J. R. (1984), The Culture of Public Problems, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  25. Habermas J. (2023), Nuovo mutamento della sfera pubblica e politica deliberativa, Milano: Raffaello Cortina.