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The deliberate spread of disinformation and other types of false and/or misleading information is a ubiquitous and pervasive issue in Bulgaria. False information is constantly being proliferated on both traditional and social media by opaque networks of influence consisting of a wide variety of actors, including journalists, opinion leaders, business elites, politicians, and even some of the highest-ranking representatives from each branch of government. Content-wise, the vast majority of disinformation in Bulgaria is identical or closely aligned with that coming from the Kremlin and Kremlin-controlled entities based in Russia. Simultaneously, however, most of the actors spreading it in Bulgaria are local ones that are not nominally owned or controlled by the Russian state or other Russian entities. Officially, the Kremlin maintains a minuscule direct presence in Bulgaria’s media landscape but holds considerable political and economic influence which it uses to exert control over key media groups, politicians, public servants, and businesses.
Bulgarian society has repeatedly been shown to be among the most susceptible to disinformation and other types of false and/or misleading information among EU and NATO members. This acute vulnerability stems from a complex of factors, most importantly a historical predisposition toward Russia, low levels of information and media literacy, low levels of trust in democratic institutions and media, as well as persistent issues with institutionalized corruption and media capture.
The following report provides an assessment of the impact of disinformation on Bulgarian society by referring to various indicators commonly used in disinformation studies to estimate impact. By necessity, most of these indicators treat reach as a proxy for impact as there are no conceivable scientific methods to directly observe and measure fluctuations in collective knowledge. The indicators for approximating the impact of recurrent disinformation used in this study include conventional production (e.g., number of media articles published) and consumption (e.g., number of interactions on a social media post) metrics, repetitive opinion polls, focus groups, as well as the discourse and voting habits of political leadership. While there are inherent limitations to each of these, taken together they can provide a valid estimation of the overall social impact of disinformation in Bulgaria.
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