Tier 3
State information environment / disinformation
The government does not systematically flood the information environment with deliberate falsehood or attempt to monopolize the public narrative.
Standing reading
Actions
Reading since 2026-07-10
Event timeline
Event list (text)
- The record on election-legitimacy claims, January 2025-July 2026 — 2025-03-25 (pattern)
What raises this reading
- Coordinated, deliberate state disinformation campaigns at volume ("flood the zone")
What lowers it
- Ordinary political spin and messaging, distinguished from deliberate falsehood
- a plural media environment that can and does fact-check government claims
Protect Democracy Ruth Ben-Ghiat V-Dem Institute
Disconfirmer
A documented pattern of coordinated, deliberately false government messaging at volume, distinct from ordinary spin, would raise this reading; continued operation of a plural, fact-checking media environment holds it in place.
Provenance
- Protect Democracy, The Authoritarian Playbook (tactic 2: spreading disinformation) — https://protectdemocracy.org/work/the-authoritarian-playbook/
- Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (2020) — the propaganda element — https://www.sfu.ca/vancity-office-community-engagement/below-the-radar-podcast/transcripts/218-ruth-ben-ghiat.html
- V-Dem Institute, Democracy Report 2025 — freedom of expression component — https://www.v-dem.net/documents/60/V-dem-dr__2025_lowres.pdf
Changelog
- 2026-07-10: (initial) → contested: Initial calibration. Scholarship.md itself flags this indicator as "hard to score objectively" (Part VI, indicator 11) and the source record contains no specific, confirmed instance of coordinated state disinformation at volume for the current period, only the general framework concern. A plural, fact-checking media environment continues to operate. Contested is the conservative reading; this indicator is a standing candidate for the explicit contrary-signal search required by scoring principle 10 when evidence is thin in either direction.
Entries (1)
The record on election-legitimacy claims, January 2025-July 2026
From January 2025 through mid-2026 the president and official White House accounts repeatedly characterized the 2020 and 2024 elections as fraudulent or 'rigged' and mail-in voting as a 'scam.' Courts, federal election officials, and state audits consistently found these claims unsupported. Two executive orders translated the fraud rhetoric into federal election-administration requirements, several of which courts enjoined.