Global Disinformation Policy Database
A cross-national record of how states govern information disorder.
Spanning 364 policies from 133 governments, 2000–2023.
Three findings
When the wave broke, what the words mean, how governments act.
01 · Temporal evolution
The wave started in 2012 — not 2016.
Annual adoption climbed from 5.2 policies/year before 2012 to 26.9 after — a five-fold jump that began four years before the post-2016 disinformation panic.
See the timeline02 · Conceptualization
Most policies don’t define the term they invoke.
60% of policies invoke a label like “disinformation,” “fake news,” or “propaganda,” and 81% of those never define it. Even among the policies that engage the concept further, 39.6% impose no intent requirement.
See the labels vs. reality03 · Governance shape
What governments do depends on where they are.
Africa runs on one instrument: 92% of its policies use incentive instruments (fines, criminal sanctions, grants). Europe spreads across the toolkit: incentive leads at 39.5%, authority (mandates, bans, licensing rules) follows at 34.2%, and capacity (regulator agencies, media-literacy programs, training) takes 21.1%.
See the governance map