Concept

Structural receptivity

Structural receptivity is the condition of an audience that makes a given falsehood liveable, prior to and independent of anyone circulating it.

Almost all research on disinformation is supply-side. It counts posts, maps networks, attributes campaigns and measures reach. The implicit model is contamination: a hostile actor introduces a falsehood into a healthy information environment, and the falsehood spreads.

This gets the causality the wrong way round often enough to be a problem. A conspiracy theory finds purchase in a population that already has use for it. The claim answers a question the audience was carrying, resolves a dissonance, or supplies a villain for an injury that was real. Where none of that obtains, the same claim, pushed with the same resources, dies quietly.

Structural receptivity names what has to be true of an audience beforehand. It is a property of institutional trust, material circumstance and epistemic infrastructure, and it can be measured, which the supply-side framing cannot easily accommodate.

The policy consequence is uncomfortable. If receptivity does the explanatory work, then takedowns, attribution and content moderation address the least tractable part of the problem, and the tractable part is the condition of the public itself.