Understanding young adults’ resilience to disinformation: A cross-national analysis of daily tactics and resources to navigate information

Little is known about how resilience to disinformation develops and manifests in people’s daily lives. Addressing this gap, our study investigates young adults’ tactics for navigating disinformation and the resources they draw from throughout this process. Based on 29 semi-structured interviews with young adults (aged 18–32) in Germany and the Netherlands, we develop a taxonomy of tactics for navigating disinformation. Our comparative analysis reveals that the same tactics are employed in both countries despite different contexts, suggesting transnational mechanisms of how citizens deal with disinformation. We find that young adults’ economic, cultural, social, and personal resources profoundly shape the extent and efficacy of employed tactics. Structural inequalities, resulting in fewer resources, negatively impact the development of resilience to disinformation. Demonstrating how tactics connect to resources, our study provides a contextual perspective to the over-individualized debate on resilience to disinformation, which mainly focuses on literacies and places responsibility on the individual.