IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jsoctx/v15y2025i7p175-d1685721.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Democracy Dysfunctions and Citizens’ Digital Agency in Highly Contaminated Digital Information Ecosystems

Author

Listed:
  • Juan Herrero

    (Department of Psychology, Universidad de Oviedo, 33003 Oviedo, Spain)

  • Hazal Dilan Erdem

    (Department of Psychology, Universidad de Oviedo, 33003 Oviedo, Spain)

  • Andrea Torrres

    (Department of Psychology, Universidad de Oviedo, 33003 Oviedo, Spain)

  • Alberto Urueña

    (Department of Organization, Business Administration and Statistics, ETSI Industriales, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28006 Madrid, Spain)

Abstract

Social media platforms have been recognized as significant contributors to the dissemination of polarizing content, the spread of disinformation, and the proliferation of far-right populist discourse. While certain political actors deliberately seek to disseminate disinformation, a more nuanced understanding is necessary to elucidate why users consume and accept this biased content. Using data from over 120,000 participants across five European and Spanish surveys, we empirically examined the relationships between social media use, disinformation, false news, users’ digital agency, far-right ideology, and far-right voting. We postulated that a lack of users’ digital agency is a significant contributor to this phenomenon and found a significant association between users’ low digital agency and the adoption of far-right ideologies (odds ratio [OR] = 1.16, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.08–1.23). This association remained after controlling for trust in social media news, psychological and social factors, sociodemographic variables, and response bias.

Suggested Citation

  • Juan Herrero & Hazal Dilan Erdem & Andrea Torrres & Alberto Urueña, 2025. "Democracy Dysfunctions and Citizens’ Digital Agency in Highly Contaminated Digital Information Ecosystems," Societies, MDPI, vol. 15(7), pages 1-21, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jsoctx:v:15:y:2025:i:7:p:175-:d:1685721
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/7/175/pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/7/175/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jsoctx:v:15:y:2025:i:7:p:175-:d:1685721. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.