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

Conclusion: From efficacy to legitimacy

Misinformation cannot be addressed by correction alone. Debunking, prebunking, detection, labelling and moderation remain necessary parts of the response, especially where false claims cause direct harm or where coordinated manipulation is at play. But they are not sufficient as the organising frame for next-generation misinformation civic tech. The deeper challenge is not only whether information is true or false, but how democratic societies build the trusted relationships, institutional capacities and public infrastructures needed to navigate uncertainty, disagreement and contested knowledge.

This concept note has argued for “thinking outside the bunk”: not as a rejection of fact-checking, but as a call to broaden the development field. A narrow focus on correction risks challenges for contemporary democracies. It can generate democratic legitimacy problems when decisions about acceptable speech appear to be controlled by governments, experts, or platforms rather than by publicly accountable processes, or by processes that acknowledge that what counts as ‘good enough’ information is contestable. It can misdiagnose the problem by assuming that democratic societies once shared a stable “age of fact”, when public truth has always been contested and unequally organised. It can also lead us to more adversarial routes over collaboration and strong societal dialogue.

The interviews conducted with specialists and frontline workers point towards a different opportunity space. Misinformation should be treated not only as harmful content to be removed, but also as a signal of unmet information needs, weak institutional relationships, social fragmentation and failures of trust. This shifts the design challenge. Next-generation civic tech should help public bodies, civil society, expert communities, trusted intermediaries and local communities coordinate around information integrity. It should support listening as well as communicating.

For Scotland, this creates a distinctive policy opportunity. Scotland can build on its own traditions of collaborative governance, community empowerment and public-sector innovation to think about alternatives. A Scottish approach to misinformation civic tech would focus on legitimacy as much as efficacy. It would ask not only whether a tool can detect falsehoods, but whether it strengthens public trust, supports frontline workers, enables community-led responses, includes digitally excluded groups, and helps institutions learn from the communities they serve.

Future funding should not only support tools that identify bad information. It should also support tools that improve the democratic conditions under which information circulates. This includes technologies for social listening, coalition-building, trusted intermediary networks, co-designed communication, uncertainty communication, perspective diversification, and the translation of misinformation research into practice.

The central question, then, is not whether societies should debunk misinformation. They should. The more important question is what else they must build. The next generation of misinformation civic tech should move beyond the promise of simply correcting citizens and towards the harder democratic task of strengthening collective sense-making. That means designing technologies that help institutions become more trustworthy, communities become more capable, and public information systems become more plural, responsive and resilient. There are good cases for inspiration out there. Below, I list some that I find particularly relevant.

This, of course, is not without challenge within the scope of public innovation processes. For once, the work of building connections and trust with communities, co-designing with them, learning from frontline workers, and similar tasks requires time and patience, which typically exceed the development cycles and funding for technologies. It is important, therefore, that we remain critical of any approach that seeks to redirect resources away from frontline workers in order to fund techno-solutionist approaches. Rather, the opportunity is to fund technical systems that thrive in collaboration with frontline workers and communities alike.