Bennett, W. L., & Livingston, S. (2018). The disinformation order: Disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions. European Journal of Communication, 33, 122–139. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323118760317
Summary
Bennett and Livingston reframe the surge of strategic disinformation in democratic nations not as scattered “fake news” incidents but as a systemic phenomenon they call the disinformation order. Their central argument is that this order is rooted in a legitimacy crisis — declining citizen trust in parties, parliaments, elections and the mainstream press — rather than in media technology alone. They connect disinformation especially to authoritarian/radical-right movements and to foreign (notably Russian) efforts to destabilize centre parties and elections, using cases such as Brexit and Trump’s 2016 victory. The article is a conceptual essay that calls on political communication scholarship to move beyond established concepts (framing, agenda-setting, gatekeeping) and the dominant “populism” frame to address these deeper democratic disruptions.
Key Contributions
- Introduces the “disinformation order” as a conceptual frame shifting attention from isolated falsehoods to systemic institutional and communicative breakdown.
- Proposes the disinformation-amplification-reverberation (DAR) cycle as an analytical tool describing how content cycles between alt-right and mainstream media.
- Clarifies terminology: distinguishes disinformation (intentional) from misinformation (inadvertent) and from the misleading label “fake news,” and separates alt-right disinformation outlets (e.g. Breitbart) from partisan conservative journalism.
- Critiques the populism literature for reducing the problem to anti-elite anger while missing deeper agendas of racism, nationalism and anti-globalism.
- Sets out a research agenda linking disinformation to declining institutional trust, foreign information warfare, and normative assessment of democratic disruption.
Methods
A conceptual and theoretical essay rather than an empirical study. The authors develop their framework through case-study illustration and narrative analysis (the Ami Horowitz/Fox News Sweden episode, the “birther” movement, the German “Lisa” story), synthesize secondary evidence (Eurobarometer and OECD trust data, European Social Survey, Facebook’s internal “Information Operations” report), and draw comparative reference across many national contexts (US, UK, Germany, Sweden, Hungary, Poland, etc.). They adapt Facebook’s operational distinction between disinformation and misinformation and ground the argument in democratic theory of institutional decline (Mair’s “hollowing,” Crouch’s “post-democracy,” Zakaria’s “illiberal democracy,” Chadwick’s hybrid media system).
Findings
- Average trust in national parliaments and governments across the EU has fallen to around 30%, down roughly a dozen points since the 2008 financial crisis.
- A legacy-media “amplifier effect” spreads absurd stories that earlier gatekeeping would have suppressed — an effect that can even be strengthened by fact-checking.
- Radical-right party vote share has grown disproportionately relative to the left and to the actual population of radical identifiers.
- Documented foreign operations include Russia’s Internet Research Agency, Fancy Bear hacking, and China’s paid commenters producing an estimated 448 million posts per year.
- In the 2016 US election, the top 20 fake news stories on Facebook drew more engagement (8.7M) than the top real news stories (7.3M).
- Disinformation is embedded in networks of funders, think tanks and parties (Mercer-backed Breitbart, Koch-backed Daily Caller), making it structurally central rather than marginal.
- Institutional responses are emerging, e.g. Germany’s Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz and Finland’s NATO-affiliated hybrid-threats centre.
Connections
This is a foundational conceptual statement whose “disinformation order” and DAR-cycle framing inform later work on radical-right and alt-right media ecosystems, particularly Marwick2026-qd and studies of networked propaganda echoing Benkler2018-lw. Its emphasis on the amplifier effect and cross-media reverberation connects to research on how false content propagates (Vosoughi2018-at, Starbird2019-qv) and to Chadwick’s hybrid media system Chadwick2015-ii. The paper’s turn away from a purely technological account toward institutional trust and affective/partisan drivers links it to work on partisanship and polarization Iyengar2019-jj and on the partisan psychology of sharing false stories Osmundsen2021-et; a companion agenda-setting statement by the same lead author appears in Bennett2025-xs.