Commercial Innovation Opportunities for Civic Tech to Reduce Misinformation: "Thinking outside the bunk"

Introduction

Morgan begins following wellness creators after struggling with fatigue and poor sleep. At first, the advice seems harmless: try magnesium supplements, gut health, and morning sunlight routines. But soon their feed fills with warnings about “hidden toxins,” seed oils, tap water, and pharmaceutical influence. Influencers mix scientific language, personal testimony, podcasts, and screenshots from studies, while comments fill with supplement recommendations and stories of doctors dismissing symptoms. In a healthy democracy, it is important to be critical and hear a broad set of views. Trying to sort through the conflicting advice, Morgan checks the NHS website for guidance on supplements and nutrition and finds the information trustworthy, but cautious and less compelling than the certainty offered online. Who should one trust?

Misinformation is now a central concern in debates about democratic resilience, public trust, public health, elections, climate action and digital governance. There are many related terms and nuances within the misinformation discourse, including disinformation, false advertising, post-truth, unverified information, rumours, fake news, conspiracy theories, alternative facts, hoaxes, and propaganda (Broda & Strömbäck, 2024; Sanfilippo et al., 2025). At the core of these distinctions are questions of intent and issues of scale and organisation.

Distinct forms and sources of misinformation, of course, have important consequences for any response strategy. Most specifically, there are coordinated attacks that may be better addressed through National Security frameworks than through the civic discourse lens (Scharfbillig et al., 2026). Nevertheless, the converse is often neglected, where misinformation emerges unintentionally through the coordination failure of actors trying, but failing, to usefully make sense of collective experiences.

This concept note is therefore largely focused on the internal dynamics of misinformation within a society, from a perspective of healthy civic discourse, rather than on external threats.

Misinformation at a glance

Misinformation is also a process that encompasses its production, consumption, amplification and collective regulation. Much has been discussed about the accelerating effect of social media and hyperconnectivity in the spread of misinformation and in increasing its impact (Adams et al., 2023; Aïmeur et al., 2023). Nowadays, Generative AI can lower the cost of producing persuasive text, images, audio and video, including deepfakes, while also making it harder for citizens, journalists and public institutions to distinguish authentic material from manipulated or synthetic content (Jaidka et al., 2025).

And finally, states throughout the world have struggled to regulate social media companies, with increasing market concentrations and transnational structures, and have mostly allowed self-regulatory practices (Stockmann, 2023). In that sense, the challenges we face are intensified across the whole social and technical cycle of misinformation.

Diagram showing three overlapping information practices within a dashed box labelled “Regulatory environment”. At the centre is “Everyday information practices”. Three surrounding circular areas represent “Producing claims”, “Encountering information”, and “Sharing information”. Curved arrows around the circles suggest these practices are connected and cyclical.

At the European level, responses have not only been regulatory, but also socio-technical in developing solutions that help journalists and regular citizens to better engage with information (Navarro et al., 2025).

Relevant technical approaches have already been explored that go beyond the fact-checking approach. For instance, provenance approaches and technical watermarking help maintain the authenticity and understand the origins of the information (Bertini et al., 2025; Shaliyar & Mustafa, 2023). And more broadly, media literacy interventions seek to increase the resilience of the general public (Droog et al., 2025). However, above all other, technical responses draw from the framing of fact-checking, both debunking after receipt and prebunking against misinformation before it might reach a recipient (Bruns et al., 2024; Navarro et al., 2025) – the “-bunk” approach.

Diagram showing “Everyday information practices” at the centre, surrounded by three connected practices: “Producing claims”, “Encountering information”, and “Sharing information”. Additional interventions are positioned around the diagram: provenance verification of information, prebunking before encountering misinformation, debunking after encountering misinformation, content moderation affecting dissemination, and media literacy. Curved arrows indicate how these interventions relate to different stages of information practice.

Pre-bunking, in particular, is gaining traction and can broadly be defined as interventions to prevent misinformation by warning or by raising audiences' resilience to future falsehoods (Bruns et al., 2024; Hameleers, 2024). For this, the medical metaphor of ‘inoculation’ is often used for misinformation, in recognition of the analogy to diseases spreading person-to-person across a population, and which can also speak to the complexity of countering its spread, if we consider the controversies surrounding vaccination and legal mandates.