| Abstract [eng] |
This thesis examines the resilience of socially vulnerable groups in Lithuania to disinformation, a growing challenge to democratic processes in the contemporary information environment. The theoretical section discusses the concepts of disinformation, vulnerability, and resilience, the dimensions of social vulnerability, social identity theory, and the role of institutional trust in reducing vulnerability to disinformation. The empirical analysis, based on Eurobarometer and the 2024 European Parliament Election Study data, evaluates whether education, employment status, family composition, place of residence, and subjective economic well-being predict more frequent encounters with disinformation and stronger beliefs that the media disseminated disinformation during the elections. It also assesses whether institutional trust and satisfaction with democracy are associated with these perceptions. Methodologically, the study applies descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, ordinal and multinomial logistic regression, and nonparametric tests. The results show that most hypotheses linking objective indicators of social vulnerability to more frequent self-reported encounters with disinformation were not supported. Education, employment status, place of residence, and number of children in the household were not statistically significant factors, indicating that socioeconomic characteristics alone cannot explain vulnerability to disinformation. In contrast, hypotheses related to institutional trust and democratic satisfaction were confirmed. Lower satisfaction with democracy and weaker trust in institutions were associated with stronger beliefs about the presence of disinformation and more frequent self-reported encounters with it. This results imply that political attitudes are more influential predictors of vulnerability than sociodemographic characteristics. The study concludes that vulnerability to disinformation is more closely linked to subjective evaluations and institutional trust. Accordingly, social policy measures that reduce social alienation and strengthen societal trust may enhance overall resilience to disinformation. |
