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

Arguments to think ‘outside the bunk’

Misinformation interventions can be useful, but they raise difficult governance questions. In modern and complex democratic societies, information and misinformation operate more on a spectrum than a binary, and intent is hard to establish, which is core for how some distinguish mis and disinformation (Adams et al., 2023). Misinformation is complicated by the fact that scientific claims often face controversy before gaining acceptance, with multiple actors claiming the truth, and debates take time to settle or stabilise (Martin, 2026). Relatedly, traditional expert institutions have lost ground in their ability to close down or tame public debate, and the question of who counts as an expert is becoming increasingly contentious (Eyal, 2019).

There are many examples of clear-cut lies fabricated by malicious actors who thrive and profit from chaos. These may even entail forms of unconventional warfare between states (Fiala & Worrall, 2024). In this context, two distinct kinds of development are necessary: one addressing misinformation from a security perspective and another from a civic discourse perspective. As previously mentioned, although there is a compelling reason to approach the misinformation problem from a security angle, including threat modelling of malicious actors, this is beyond the scope of this concept note.

But for much of our online and offline civil discourse, misinformation operates in a complex grey area that needs to be accounted for. Temptations to see the challenge only as a matter of unidirectionally providing expert information to a misinformed citizenry will likely revive old debates about the ‘deficit model’ ^[1]and face significant pushback, perhaps from the very segments of the population it intends to support.

For the reason of these competing interests over collective sense making, the core policy challenge is not simply how to moderate content in a truth-false spectrum (the pre/de ‘bunk’ approach), but how to govern information environments democratically. A narrow emphasis on moderation can frame the issue as one of enforcement against bad content, while a broader information integrity approach asks how institutions, platforms, media, civil society and communities can build trustworthy, plural and accountable public spaces for collective sense-making.

This is especially important for any funding mechanism supporting next-gen Misinformation civic tech: the most strategic value may lie less in duplicating an already crowded moderation field and more in supporting collaborative, democratic and preventative capacities that improve how societies navigate contested information. Below, I outline four reasons we might benefit from ‘thinking outside the bunk’.

1. Democratic legitimacy risks

‘Bunking’ approaches can easily be perceived as undemocratic when they appear to shift decisions about public speech from citizens and democratic civil institutions to states, experts, or private platforms (B. Ganapini, 2026; Farkas & Schou, 2023; Kozyreva et al., 2023). Even when moderation is justified as a response to misinformation or harm, public acceptance may depend on additional measures like transparency, accountability, due process, and meaningful contestability. But also, research shows that the perception of ‘who’ is doing the moderation, and agreement with the substance of information being moderated, will have significant effects (Fichtner, 2022; Huang, 2025; Martel et al., 2025).

Without these safeguards, moderation can be framed as censorship, elite control, or partisan intervention, especially in polarised environments where trust in institutions is already fragile. Examples of these are the controversies regarding harmful content regulation in the UK Online Safety Act, Germany’s Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) or Europe’s Code of Conduct on Disinformation. In that sense, the democratic risk is therefore not only that moderation may restrict a right to expression, but that moderation may be publicly framed as restricting legitimate disagreement, thereby undermining trust in democratic institutions. Or, in other words, the opportunity is thinking of legitimacy as much as efficacy.

2. The myth of a past ‘age of fact’

Fact-checking and other information moderation policies often rest on an implicit contrast between a supposedly stable past, in which public debate was organised around shared facts, and a disrupted present marked by misinformation, disinformation, and post-truth politics. This framing of an ‘age of facts’ (Hannon, 2023; van Dyk, 2022) is historically more complex. For one, it may overlook that large portion of the population has previously been excluded from these information spaces (Farkas & Schou, 2023) and that expertise has historically been politically contested (Eyal, 2019).

Falsehood, propaganda, rumour, selective evidence, and struggles over public truth have long been part of democratic life (Farkas & Schou, 2023). What has changed is not the existence of misinformation itself, but the speed, scale, visibility, and infrastructural conditions through which contested claims circulate (Broda & Strömbäck, 2024). A public innovation strategy centred on restoring a lost ‘age of fact’ risks misdiagnosing the problem. The challenge is to build more democratic capacities to navigate coordinated attacks, uncertainty, disagreement, and trust, without ignoring the historically problematic unequal access to a public voice.

3. Limited strategic advantage of funding more ‘bunk’ methods

As noted, fact-checking (both debunking and pre-bunking) has already become one of the dominant responses in the misinformation and platform governance space. Considerable policy, research, and innovation have been directed towards fact-checking, detection, labelling, content removal, and independent auditing. This does not mean these interventions are unimportant, but it does suggest that an additional funding mechanism centred mainly on ‘bunking’ may offer limited strategic added value^[2]. A more distinctive funding role would be to support underdeveloped approaches that address the civic, institutional, and relational conditions that shape how information is trusted, contested, and acted upon, rather than reinforcing an already crowded intervention field.

Moreover, there is already significant development on the use of AI for this purpose, especially for the use in media (Cazzamatta & Sarısakaloğlu, 2025). At the European Level, projects such as PROVENANCE, SocialTruth, EUNOMIA, and WeVerify were already funded to lay the foundation of new solutions in the pre- and debunking space. And now, new projects such as AI4Debunk and TITAN are bringing LLMs to improve and expand solutions. And there are even signals of new directions emerging, for example, by tackling misinformation and information integrity through broad societal participation and critical thinking, as in the project RESIST (Strengthening Societal Resilience to Disinformation in Europe). There is a great opportunity for Scotland to add a unique and fresh perspective to the debate by funding new ideas and perspectives ‘outside the bunk’.

4. Adversarial response versus collaborative governance: a Scottish Approach?

Fact-checking tends to encourage a more adversarial approach to governance: the problem is defined as a dichotomy where individuals are either informed or uninformed (Broda & Strömbäck, 2024), or as malicious content whose response is enforcement. This approach sits uneasily with collaborative governance traditions that emphasise co-production, participation, partnership, and shared responsibility (Ansell, 2012). In Scotland, collaborative governance is indeed a key element of the political and administrative culture, with emblematic cases such as the Christie Commission advocating for people and collaboration-led public administration. Other examples range from the legislative, as in the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act (2015), to specific innovations like “We asked, you said, we did” consultations (Bellò & Downe, 2022).

Is there a way to bring the ‘Scottish Approach’ to misinformation technology? Possibly, such an approach would support institutions, communities, media actors, educators, civil society, and digital platforms to deliberate together about information harms, public trust, and democratic resilience. But also, it would recognise that since misinformation thrives in social inequity and fragmentation (Sanfilippo et al., 2025), there are good reasons to approach it through dialogue and mutual recognition.