The Global Battle Over Who Gets to Define Truth
In July 2026, a federal judge delivered a significant blow to the Trump administration’s efforts to silence foreign disinformation researchers by blocking a policy that threatened them with visa denials and deportation. This legal setback, however, represents only one skirmish in a much larger and more consequential war. The administration’s framing of disinformation research as a form of censorship, part of its broader fight against a so-called “censorship-industrial complex,” is not an isolated American political quirk. Instead, it is a highly visible manifestation of a global pattern that has been developing for over a decade, where authoritarian governments and populist movements alike have systematically weaponized the very language of disinformation to consolidate their own power and undermine their opponents.
Political science research offers a crucial framework for understanding this phenomenon, moving beyond the surface-level drama of American politics to reveal the deep structural dynamics at play. By examining how governments in Russia and China have co-opted the institutions of fact-checking, and how right-wing populists in Europe have weaponized accusations of “fake news,” we can see that the current fight over truth is not a technical problem to be solved but a fundamental political battleground where the authority to decide what is true is the ultimate prize.
At the heart of this conflict, political scientist Scott Radnitz identifies three distinct coalitions that have emerged over the past decade to contest authority over truth, particularly in the United States and Europe: incumbents, skeptics, and challengers. The incumbents are the established players in the information ecosystem—government agencies, tech platforms, mainstream media outlets, and academic institutions. Galvanized by events like Brexit and the first election of Donald Trump, this coalition shares a belief that misinformation is a technical problem that must be identified and corrected by credentialed experts, not by the general public. Projects like the European Union’s EUvsDisinfo exemplify this approach. However, their methods have drawn criticism from two very different directions. The skeptics, who include public intellectuals like Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt, share the incumbents’ democratic values but are wary of their methods. They argue that fact-checking and platform moderation can easily become tools to shut down legitimate debate. The challengers, conversely, have fundamentally reshaped the political landscape. This group, comprising populist politicians like Donald Trump and online influencers like Elon Musk, rejects the incumbents’ expert authority outright, embracing a populist epistemology that prioritizes ordinary experience and opinion over professional credentials. They have successfully reframed fact-checking and platform moderation as outright censorship, building a case through years of hearings and lawsuits that these mechanisms are tools for silencing conservative speech.
The new Trump administration, viewing itself as a challenger coalition, has now turned this long-simmering argument into official government policy, using federal power to defund and dismantle the fact-checking infrastructure that the incumbent coalition had built. This strategy, however, is not unique to the United States. It is part of a global pattern where governments and politicians find their own ways to contest and capture the authority over truth. Russia provides a stark example of how a state can reverse-engineer fact-checking to serve its own propaganda purposes. The Kremlin has built a massive, coordinated network of TV shows, websites, and social media channels that mimic the format of professional verification, complete with links, sources, and forensic-sounding language. The goal is not to correct disinformation but to amplify it. A prime example is War on Fakes, a Kremlin-affiliated network of Telegram channels that produces posts that look like legitimate fact-checks, but which ultimately rely on the channel’s own previous posts or state-controlled Russian media as their primary sources. Over time, the careful language of investigation gives way to blunt political attacks, branding any source critical of the Kremlin as illegitimate. The goal of this elaborate charade is to inoculate Russian citizens against information that could provoke discontent about the war, while maintaining a semblance of normalcy. This strategy has been shown to be effective in different ways: it induces uncertainty and justification for inaction among regime critics, while reinforcing existing partisan biases among regime supporters, allowing them to dismiss contradicting information as “fake.”
China has adopted a strikingly similar strategy, albeit through a different mechanism. Facing an information environment where censorship alone became too difficult to sustain online, the Chinese government shifted from simply suppressing rumors to actively refuting them through a strategy known as “rumor debunking.” This approach borrows the visual grammar of professional fact-checking to confer an air of authority on what is, in essence, government messaging. Websites like The Joint mimic the format of professional fact-checkers with color-coded verdicts and investigative headlines, but their substance is pure official propaganda, citing mostly government sources and adopting Beijing’s party line. Crucially, unlike Western fact-checking, Chinese debunks rarely target criticisms of the government or its officials. Instead, they overwhelmingly focus on rumors about everyday life, such as food shortages or hospital failures, effectively identifying citizens as the source of social disorder while deflecting blame from official failures. This tactic proves effective; most citizens find these posts credible, especially when they are specific, provide evidence, and note that the rumormonger has been punished. For the Chinese government, this is a powerful tool for maintaining its monopoly on official narratives and controlling the flow of information.
In Western Europe, the same battle for authority over truth is waged by right-wing populist parties, who have made accusing the media and political rivals of spreading disinformation a routine part of their political communication. While they lack the state resources to build sprawling pseudo fact-checking ecosystems like Russia or China, their tactic of deploying the accusation itself is highly effective at delegitimizing their opponents. Large-scale analyses of politicians’ statements in Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands show that populist politicians are more than three times as likely as mainstream politicians to use this kind of disinformation discourse. Their goal is not just to cast doubt on a single story but to deconstruct the entire concept of established knowledge, building support for an alternative, emotionally resonant reality that pits “the people” against a dishonest elite. This tactic peaks around elections, suggesting it is a core electoral strategy. Research shows that these accusations work selectively but effectively: they reduce audience trust in the targeted news outlet without damaging the accusing politician’s own credibility. While the broader effect on institutional media trust is most pronounced among those who already hold populist attitudes, the general strategy allows populist leaders to chip away at stories critical of them at virtually no political cost to themselves.
Across these diverse contexts—from Moscow to Beijing to Washington and across European capitals—the tools differ, but the underlying objective is remarkably consistent. The reverse-engineered fact-checks of Russia, the rumor debunking of China, and the disinformation accusations of Europe’s populist right all share a fundamental recognition: that controlling the process of adjudicating truth is a profound source of political power. In an era where centralized control over belief is becoming increasingly difficult, these leaders are not necessarily trying to control what people think, but rather to control who has the authority to say what is false. By attacking the credibility of experts, independent media, and fact-checkers, they are attempting to dismantle the entire institutional framework that might hold them accountable. The fight over disinformation, therefore, is a structural feature of contemporary politics, not a series of isolated episodes. As our information environments become more complex, contests over who gets to decide what is true or false will only intensify. For the public, this means the critical question is no longer simply “is this claim true?” but rather a more fundamental set of inquiries: who is claiming the authority to decide, how does their intervention affect their target audience, and, most importantly, what does gaining that authority allow them to do?
