Most of us still picture propaganda as an old-fashioned assault on the truth: a loud, confident lie, repeated until enough people start to believe it. For decades, that was the basic business model of disinformation. Governments and political extremists would craft a message—maybe a fake story about an enemy, a manipulated photograph, a convenient conspiracy—and then push it out through media channels, hoping to persuade the public that this or that falsehood was actually real. But something has changed. According to Paolo Cesarini, the chair of the Executive Board of the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), the modern strategy behind disinformation operations is no longer persuasion at all. It is something more subtle and more corrosive. Speaking in an interview with Ukrinform, Cesarini described a new approach that he calls “cognitive erosion.” The goal is not to convince you that a particular lie is true. The goal is to make you stop believing that any truth is findable. This shift has been accelerated enormously by artificial intelligence, which now makes it possible to flood the information space with an endless, chaotic stream of content: deepfakes, altered audio, fake news sites, bot-generated arguments, and contradictions that seem to multiply every hour. The result is not a battle between truth and lies. It is a fog. And in that fog, people don’t become better informed—they become exhausted, confused, and eventually indifferent. That indifference, Cesarini argues, is the real prize for hostile actors. They don’t need to win your heart or your mind. They only need to make you stop caring.
Think of what cognitive erosion actually looks like in everyday life. It is like water wearing away a stone, not through one dramatic wave, but through constant, dripping repetition. You see a headline that claims a politician has done something unforgivable. You share it, or at least you read it. Then, a few hours later, another headline appears, saying that the first headline was itself a lie. Then a fake video surfaces, showing something that never happened. Then an official source says the video was manipulated. Then another anonymous account posts a “leaked” document that contradicts the official source. After enough time in this cycle, the brain begins to shut down. You stop trying to figure out what’s real. You start telling yourself, “Everything is fake anyway.” And that mental shrug is exactly what the operation was designed to produce. Cesarini notes that classic disinformation operations, like classic influence operations, were designed to persuade people. But with artificial intelligence taking a huge role in producing and distributing information online, the strategy is no longer persuasion or motivation. “Now it is cognitive erosion,” he says. This is a critical distinction. Persuasion aims to create a believer. Cognitive erosion aims to create a cynic. A believer will act on a lie. A cynic may not act at all. And for those who seek to destabilize societies, a population that refuses to act, that refuses to trust, that refuses to engage, is actually easier to manage than a population fired up by a false idea. Apathy is not a side effect. It is the mission.
The consequences of this strategy are profound, and they reach far beyond the internet. Cesarini warns that cognitive erosion leads to disengagement, cynicism, and a stubborn defiance of state authority and government institutions. When people no longer believe in any fact or source, they no longer believe in the shared foundation that makes democracy work. Democracy is built on the idea that we can disagree about policies, but we can still agree on basic facts: who won an election, whether a disease is spreading, whether a war is being fought. If fact itself becomes a matter of opinion, or worse, a matter of suspicion, then public debate collapses. Instead of citizens who argue with each other, you get isolated individuals who simply stop paying attention. This is sometimes called learned helplessness. The information environment becomes so chaotic, so filled with seeming contradictions, that people feel powerless to know anything, so they stop trying. The result is that hostile actors don’t necessarily need to push a particular narrative. They can simply weaken the population’s immune system, so to speak, making it impossible for people to respond effectively to any narrative, whether true or false. That is why Cesarini sees this as a threat to governance itself. When people defy every institution, when they refuse to accept any official information, when they treat every fact-check as a conspiracy, then governments cannot function. Public health measures lose support. Courts lose legitimacy. Elections lose meaning. And into that vacuum, a different kind of authority can step in—one that promises simple answers, strong leadership, and a return to certainty. Cognitive erosion, in other words, is not just about making people doubt. It is about making people despair, and then watching them surrender their critical faculties to whoever seems most confident.
So how can societies fight an enemy that doesn’t even bother to convince you of anything? EDMO, which brings together fact-checkers, researchers, media organizations, and digital experts from across Europe, has developed a three-layer response. The first layer is targeted monitoring. This means watching the information ecosystem in real time, tracking fake news stories, identifying artificially generated content, and detecting disinformation “spikes” as they appear in the media. It’s like an early-warning system for lies. When a suspicious video suddenly goes viral, when a fake news site starts spreading a strange claim, when a coordinated hashtag begins trending, the monitors see it quickly. This layer is essential because it catches individual incidents before they can cause too much damage. But it is not enough. A single fake news story, or even a thousand fake stories, can be debunked and still leave behind a lingering sense of doubt. The larger strategy, after all, is not about any one story—it is about the overall feeling that “you can’t trust anything.” That is why EDMO’s second layer digs deeper. It involves analyzing propaganda narratives, not just isolated headlines. For example, researchers look at the long-standing Russian narrative about a “corrupt” Ukraine. This narrative doesn’t depend on a single faked video. It is a recurring theme, repeated over months and years, in countless variations. Sometimes it appears in news articles, sometimes in social media memes, sometimes in official statements. The goal of analyzing this layer is to understand the underlying story that all these individual items are trying to tell. The story about Ukrainian corruption is not new. It was used long before the current war, and it is now used to undermine international support, discourage investment, and demoralize Ukrainians themselves. By mapping these deep narratives, EDMO can see the strategy behind the chaos, the long-term attempts to shape how entire countries are perceived.
The third layer of EDMO’s approach is perhaps the most important, because it moves from tracking content to identifying the people and networks behind it. This involves combining fact-checking with open-source intelligence, or OSINT, tools. Analysts examine metadata, social media connections, posting patterns, and the digital fingerprints left by coordinated campaigns. They look for signs that accounts in different countries are being run by the same people, or that a popular influencer is secretly part of a state-backed operation, or that a local protest page is actually financed and scripted from abroad. By connecting the dots, researchers can expose the organizers and coordinators of disinformation networks that operate across borders. This is crucial because disinformation is rarely homegrown. A network might begin in one country, use servers in another, spread messages through fake accounts in a third, and target a fourth. Without this cross-border analysis, each individual piece might look disconnected. But with OSINT, the pattern emerges: a coordinated machine, manufactured by hostile actors, designed to produce chaos. Naming these actors, showing their funding, and revealing their methods is one of the most powerful antidotes to cognitive erosion. It transforms the experience from “the internet is confusing and full of lies” to “a specific group is trying to manipulate us.” The first response creates resignation. The second creates anger and resistance. And that is precisely the point: people are more likely to fight manipulation when they can identify the manipulator.
The shift toward cognitive erosion is a warning, but it is not a reason to surrender. It is easy to defend the truth when the lie is easy to spot. It is much harder when the strategy is to make truth itself seem irrelevant. Yet by understanding this new strategy, we can begin to counter it. We can learn to distinguish between healthy skepticism and corrosive cynicism. Healthy skepticism asks questions: “Who made this claim? What evidence is there? Where does this information come from?” Corrosive cynicism simply assumes that nothing is true, and therefore stops asking questions altogether. That difference may seem small, but it is the difference between a citizen and a victim. We also need to invest in media literacy, not as a one-time course, but as a lifelong habit, taught in schools, practiced at dinner tables, and modeled by journalists and public figures. We need to support independent media, not only because it produces facts, but because it creates a sense of shared reality. We need to demand transparency from social media platforms, so that the algorithms that shape our information diets are not secretly serving the interests of foreign manipulators. And we need to remember that disinformation operations succeed when we isolate ourselves, when we stop talking to people who disagree with us, and when we abandon the messy, uncertain work of democratic debate. Cesarini’s description of cognitive erosion is sobering, but it also clarifies the challenge. The goal of the attack is not to make us believe a lie. It is to make us stop believing in anything. The only defense is to keep caring, to keep questioning, and to keep trusting in the possibility of shared truth. It is a slower, less dramatic battle than the one against obvious propaganda. But it is the battle that will determine whether our societies remain capable of self-government. We have to choose, every day, to refuse the comfortable cynicism that is being offered to us. We have to rebuild trust in the idea that facts matter, even when the facts are inconvenient, and even when the truth is messy. Because the moment we stop caring about what is true, we have already lost—not to a particular ideology, but to the erosion of everything.