1 of 23

‹#›

DIJANA ŠOBOTA, PhD

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

University of Zagreb, Croatia

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4471-8976

dsobota@ffzg.unizg.hr

DISINFORMATION, PLATFORM GOVERNANCE, AND CRITICAL INFORMATION LITERACY: LESSONS FROM THE CROATIAN WIKIPEDIA CASE

13 May 2026

online

2 of 23

‹#›

Disinformation – beyond content;

built into the system;

strategic deployment of governance procedures & ideological capture

Limitations of traditional, deficit-based approaches to information literacy

Critical information literacy as a more robust framework;

limitations & the need for a holistic, normative and political approach

CONTENT OUTLINE

3 of 23

‹#›

Wikipedia –new reputation as a trusted, open, democratic self-correcting knowledge system (Fallis, 2008; Mesgari et al., 2015), success in combatting disinformation (Forsyth, 2018; McDowell & Vetter, 2020, 2022)
Information literacy as a response to disinformation; affirmative assumptions

INTRODUCTION:

THE PROBLEM & THE BROADER CONTEXT

Systematic information crisis (LSE, 2018)

and epistemic crisis (Dahlgren, 2018)

Disinformation – a defining feature of our era (Ahlstrom-Vij, 2023; Haider & Sundin, 2022)
Undermining democracies; declining trust; disempowerment; political and social polarisation; populism (Flew et al., 2019; Humprecht et al., 2020; Newman et al., 2022)
Truth shaped by platform power

The Croatian Wikipedia case

Disinformation can operate through the systems of credibility and verifiction
Implications for information literacy

4 of 23

‹#›

Your image here

THEORETICAL-CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS OF LITERATURE

Problematic information (disinformation)

Wikipedia & platform governance

Strategies for combatting disinformation

INTERVIEWS

Journalists

Wikipedia users

Wikipedia editors

RESEARCH FOCUS & METHODOLOGY

CASE STUDY

Croatian Wikipedia analysis (edit histories,

talk pages and

administrative interventions)

https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-01-2025-0020

5 of 23

‹#›

RESEARCH QUESTION

How Wikipedia, as a democratic information platform, can be used as a

tool for digital political activism and abused for the promotion of

right-wing interpretations of history?

not just what disinformation appeared on the platform

but how disinformation became structurally embedded

6 of 23

‹#›

THE CROATIAN WIKIPEDIA CASE

A decade-long ideological capture

by nationalist-leaning administrators

Control over and abuse of editorial processes
Relativization of WWII war crimes and the Ustaše regime; nationalist revisionist agenda
Instrumentalisation of platform’s democratic governance structure and mechanisms (‘Five Pillars’)

7 of 23

‹#›

EXAMPLES OF HISTORICAL REVISIONISM

the Ustaše regime and NDH reframed as legitimate statehood aspirations rather than Nazi collaborators
Relativised attrocities committed at the Jasenovac concentration camp
Politically sensitive pages (e.g. relating to Josip Broz Tito) locked or heavily controlled to prevent corrective interventions

8 of 23

‹#›

‘PROCESS MANIPULATION’:

WEAPONISING WIKIPEDIA’S PILLARS

Process manipulation:

A form of disinformation that moves beyond content manipulation (e.g. fake news)

to process manipulation

– the platform’s own democratic rules and mechanisms to ensure accuracy

are strategically weaponised as mechanisms of distortion;

– strategic misuse/abuse of community rules

9 of 23

‹#›

MECHANISMS OF ‘PROCESS MANIPULATION’

Recurring and calculated tactics:

Sock puppetry

coordinated use of multiple fake accounts to simulate consensus

Chat room baiting

manipulation of discussion spaces to provoke and discredit/ban opposing users

Selective rule enforcement (Wikipedia’s Five Pillars – e.g. neutrality & verifiability)

rejection of edits on “formal grounds” (e.g. citation formatting; false claims of missing sources)

10 of 23

‹#›

The mechanisms and policies designed to ensure information verifiability, neutrality and platform governance repurpused and subverted
False content ‘legitimised’, protected by procedural authority
Platform’s structural vulnerability – lack of accountability and monitoring of the enforcement of rules & policies (power)

Participatory platforms not ideologically neutral; reflect the power structures that govern them

11 of 23

‹#›

Layered systems of accountability & oversight
Power-checks
Mechanisms to detect and redress abuses
Timely actions

IMPLICATIONS FOR INFORMATION & KNOWLEDGE PLATFORMS

12 of 23

‹#›

Traditional IL approaches & assumptions:

Instrumental, deficit-oriented
Truth can be accessed if the right sources are consulted and checked
Stable credibility standards & transparent authority structures
Neutral governance and enforcement
Individualising the „burden”;

individual competencies as key

THE LIMITS OF (TRADITIONAL) INFORMATION LITERACY

The Croatian Wikipedia case:

Applying IL practices did not intervene effectively
Problem not informational/content-level, but structural, political, power-related
Captured (epistemic/information/governance) authority & power
Strategic manipulation of governance (& IL) principles by those in control
Politically mediated & weaponised standards of credibility

13 of 23

‹#›

Narrow IL - ineffective and potentially counterproductive

Focus on individual responsibility, narrow trust-no-one agenda while advocating neutral, apolitical approaches risk:

legitimising compromised infrastructures
backfire-effect
risk of turning IL against itself
reinforce distrust

(e.g. Fister, 2021; Haider & Sundin, 2022; Hameleers, 2023; Hannah, 2023)

Required shift

from evaluating the content to interrogating the governance & power

14 of 23

‹#›

Critical, holistic, emancipatory, transformative; political literacy (Buschman, 2019)

Shifts analytical focus

from content to context
from evaluation to interrogation
from individual skills to power relations & social and political ideologies

Foregrounds the sociopolitical character of information systems
Invites (self-)reflexivity; „eternal alertnes” (Brisola & Doyle, 2019: 283)
Fosters critical awareness and collective agency
Reframes users from passive evaluaters & users to active transformative agents

Makes visible

Wikipedia as a contested sociotechnical and political space
Disinformation as product of governance structures & power

A CASE FOR CRITICAL INFORMATION LITERACY (CIL)

15 of 23

‹#›

CIL necessary but insufficient on its own

Complexity of the crisis of problematic information

– pedagogical, epistemic, political, economic, (infra)structural…

Critique not inherently and automatically positive and emancipatory

Need to position CIL as part of a necessary holistic, normative approach and critical political agenda for confronting disinformation

Need for:

critical pedagogies attuned to power & designed to empower
collective awareness
accountable and democratic knowledge infrastructures, institutional responsibility
broader political interventions

LIMITS OF CRITICAL INFORMATION LITERACY

16 of 23

‹#›

Library responses beyond politically neutral practices

Help users interrogate how knowledge is produced, governed, authorised and contested

Structural, collective, political

IMPLICATIONS FOR LIBRARIES /

CRITICAL LIBRARIANSHIP

19 of 23

‹#›

Neutrality claims inadequate in the face of disinformation
criticality - more than adding critical language
librarians - from „janitors of knowledge” (Sundin, 2011) to active critical, civic agents
The Wikipedia case redefines disinformation from the problem of content to the problem of process & governance
Need to transcend traditional IL approaches and analyse and

confront disinformation structurally

Critical information literacy as part of broader normative efforts

TAKEAWAYS

21 of 23

References

Ahlstrom-Vij, K. (2023), “Do we live in a ‘post-truth’ era?”, Political Studies, Vol. 71 No. 2, pp. 501-517, doi: 10.1177/00323217211026427.
Brisola, A.C. and Doyle, A. (2019), “Critical information literacy as a path to resist “fake news”: understanding disinformation as the root problem”, Open Information Science, Vol. 3 No. 1, pp. 274-286, doi: 10.1515/opis-2019-0019.
Buschman, J. (2019), “Good news, bad news, and fake news: going beyond political literacy to democracy and libraries”, Journal of Documentation, Vol. 75 No. 1, pp. 213-228, doi: 10.1108/ JD-05-2018-0074.
Car, V., & Šobota, D. (2025). Disinformation as a tool for digital political activism: Croatian Wikipedia and the case for critical information literacy. Journal of Documentation, 81(5-6), 1145–1162. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-01-2025-0020
Dahlgren, P. (2018), “Media, knowledge and trust: the deepening epistemic crisis of democracy”, Javnost-The Public, Vol. 25 Nos 1-2, pp. 20-27, doi: 10.1080/13183222.2018.1418819.
Fallis, D. (2008), “Toward an epistemology of Wikipedia”, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 59 No. 10, pp. 1662-1674, doi: 10.1002/asi.20870.
Flew, T., Martin, F. and Suzor, N.P. (2019), “Internet regulation as media policy: rethinking the question of digital communication platform governance”, Journal of Digital Media and Policy, Vol. 10 No. 1, pp. 33-50, doi: 10.1386/jdtv.10.1.33_1.
Forsyth, P. (2018), “How Wikipedia dodged the public outcry plaguing social media platforms”, The Medium, 2 December, available at: https://misinfocon.com/wikipedia-built-to-battle-fake-newsc36370fe2c0e-

22 of 23