"Effective mitigation does not eliminate disinformation—it reduces its reach, impact, and harm."
Strategies for Mitigation examines the practical and policy-oriented responses to disinformation at individual, institutional, and systemic levels. This section explores interventions such as prebunking, fact-checking, platform accountability, regulatory frameworks, and public education, while emphasising the importance of proportional, transparent, and ethically grounded action. Learners develop an integrated understanding of how mitigation strategies can be designed, evaluated, and adapted to complex and evolving information ecosystems.
Why the Internet Turns Everyone into an Expert
"Unlike Buratino, we no longer reject what we don’t understand—we confidently build worlds on it."
In the well-known Russian fairy tale about the wooden boy Buratino, there is a small but revealing scene. His teacher, Malvina, tries to teach him basic arithmetic and asks:
“Suppose you have three apples and you give two to Artemon. How many do you have left?”
Buratino replies, quite seriously:
“I would never give a single apple to Artemon, so the question makes no sense to me.”
At first glance, this is simply a joke. But it captures a deep and important tension in how humans think. Malvina is asking Buratino to accept a hypothetical assumption—a “suppose that…” scenario. Buratino refuses. He stays firmly in the world of concrete facts and personal choices. Since he would never give away an apple, the abstract problem collapses for him.
This difference—between thinking in terms of assumptions and thinking only in terms of what feels immediately real—has occupied philosophers for centuries. Immanuel Kant famously distinguished between the thing-in-itself (what exists beyond our understanding) and the phenomenon (what we can meaningfully think and talk about). His warning can be summarized simply: do not judge what you do not understand. Sound advice—but one that humans are remarkably bad at following.
In everyday life, people regularly form strong opinions on topics they barely grasp. Today, social media has turned this tendency into a global force. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube encourage constant reaction. Algorithms reward speed, emotion, and engagement—not accuracy or expertise. Speaking out matters more than knowing what you are talking about.
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the consequences of this system with alarming clarity. Suddenly, highly technical subjects—virology, epidemiology, vaccine science, public health policy—became topics of mass debate. Millions of people without relevant training confidently judged masks, vaccines, virus origins, and lockdowns. Individual misunderstandings were shared, amplified, and repeated until they formed large, coherent narratives. Repetition gave these ideas a false sense of legitimacy.
Out of this emerged global communities of pandemic skeptics and conspiracy theorists. Many participants were not malicious. They were anxious, confused, and searching for control in an uncertain world. Their arguments often looked logical. They cited data, drew causal links, and told internally consistent stories. But this was a form of pseudo-abstraction: reasoning built on false assumptions and disconnected from empirical reality.
Here is the irony. Social media actually demands a kind of abstract thinking. Users navigate symbols, memes, hashtags, and global narratives every day. Yet at the same time, it erodes the discipline that makes abstraction responsible: respect for evidence, willingness to test assumptions, and humility about one’s own knowledge. Abstraction becomes untethered—used to signal identity, express fear, or attract attention rather than to understand the world.
As a result, public discourse increasingly consists of clashes between closed belief systems. Each has its own “truths,” its own authorities, and its own logic. Because they do not share basic assumptions or facts, meaningful dialogue becomes impossible.
Buratino rejected abstraction because it felt irrelevant to his reality. The modern internet user often does the opposite: they embrace abstraction uncritically, as long as it aligns with emotion or identity. The result is not understanding, but the illusion of understanding—an epistemic void filled with confidence.
And unlike Buratino, today’s refusal to think carefully does not remain silent. It scales.