The 1 percent figure does not measure all misinformation circulating through Danish social media. It concerns posts from identified misinformation sources within a defined Facebook dataset. The six-in-ten figure measures reported experience rather than objective prevalence. These numbers describe different phenomena. Their coexistence is more interesting than deciding which one represents the “real” information environment.

For me, it raises a different question about digital inclusion in Denmark: what happens when people have access to digital information but become less certain about what within that information environment deserves their confidence?

Perception is not a measurement error

Digital inclusion has traditionally had a very practical dimension. People need access to devices and digital services. They need the skills to use them and, when necessary, somewhere to get help.

These needs remain real in Denmark. My work with Digitalt Fællesskab gives me little reason to treat access as a problem that has somehow been completed simply because Danish society is highly digitalised. But access is no longer the entire question.

A person reading political information online today may need to make a judgement about the information before making a judgement about the issue itself. Is the source credible? Is the image authentic? Has a video been edited? Does an unusual claim require further checking, or is there already enough information to proceed?

I think of this additional cognitive work as a verification burden. I use the term as a practical description, not as an established academic measure. It is the extra work required before someone feels sufficiently confident to accept, reject or act on a piece of information. That burden matters even when the material eventually turns out to be authentic.

This is why I do not read high Danish concern about misinformation simply as a measurement problem to be corrected. If citizens experience the information environment as difficult to verify, that experience becomes part of the environment in which they make decisions.

The Danish evidence from the 2024 European Parliament election campaign makes this distinction particularly visible. Researchers found few actual political deepfakes. At the same time, more than 3,500 posts discussed false or manipulated content.

The difference between those findings deserves attention. Synthetic political material does not need to dominate an information environment before it begins to affect it. Once manipulation is understood to be technically possible, authentic material can also attract suspicion. Claims that a photograph, recording or video has been manipulated can become part of political communication regardless of whether manipulation is eventually established.

Deepfakes do not need to take over the Danish internet to become democratically inconvenient. The practical change is more subtle. Citizens increasingly have to evaluate the reliability of the object carrying a political message alongside the substance of the message itself. That costs attention.

Digital resilience requires something more precise than scepticism

An obvious response is to make citizens more alert to misinformation and manipulation. There is a problem with stopping there.

Danish experimental research indicates that alarmist communication about misinformation can itself increase concern about misinformation and its democratic consequences. More warning does not automatically produce better judgement.

A citizen who distrusts everything is not necessarily better equipped for democracy than a citizen who verifies nothing. I prefer the idea of calibrated confidence: being able to recognise when additional verification is warranted, having practical ways to carry it out, and eventually deciding that the available evidence is sufficient to form a judgement.

The final part is easy to overlook. Verification has to end somewhere. Citizens cannot investigate every photograph, trace every original source and reconstruct the provenance of every political claim before participating in public life. Democratic decisions have always been made under conditions of incomplete information. Generative AI adds another source of uncertainty, but it does not remove the need to reach a judgement.

This creates an important distinction between awareness and capacity. Knowing that deepfakes exist is awareness. Being able to examine a questionable source or piece of content is a practical skill. Knowing when further investigation is justified, and when the available evidence is sufficient, involves judgement. For digital inclusion, that distinction is becoming increasingly relevant.

Digital access and democratic participation meet in the middle

I started paying more attention to this issue because I encounter adjacent versions of it in projects that are normally placed in different categories.

In Digitalt Fællesskab, the practical starting point is digital inclusion. In my work around civic education through Danmark-EU and EU-Spil, the question sits further downstream: what enables people to participate once access itself is no longer the main barrier?

Working across both has made the boundary between digital inclusion and democratic participation look considerably less tidy than it does in project descriptions. Funding programmes need categories. Citizens are under no corresponding obligation to experience their problems one category at a time.

Consider a person who has MitID, uses Digital Post, owns a smartphone, reads news online and has accounts on several social platforms. From an administrative perspective, that person may appear digitally included. Those indicators tell me relatively little about what happens when the same person encounters a suspicious image during an election campaign.

Can the person decide whether it deserves further checking? Are the available verification methods usable outside a classroom exercise? What happens if checking removes some doubts but not all of them? Most importantly, what happens afterwards?

A verified claim still has to become a judgement. A judgement still has to enter a conversation before it can become democratic participation.

The Danish evidence does not allow me to claim that misinformation uncertainty causes people to withdraw from public debate. That causal relationship has not been established, and it would weaken the argument to pretend otherwise. What Denmark does show is that participation has conditions beyond technical access.

Around one in five Danes would like to participate in digital debate but refrain because of the tone in comment fields. That finding concerns the social conditions of debate rather than misinformation. I find the distinction useful precisely because it shows how many steps sit between being digitally connected and actually participating.

Someone can have access and still stay outside the discussion. Someone can understand the technology and still hesitate over the information. Someone can verify information and still choose not to participate. These are different problems. In practice, they meet inside the same citizen.

Denmark is not starting from zero

This matters when considering what should come next.

Denmark already has a substantial infrastructure around source criticism, misinformation, digital education, AI literacy and democratic training. Fact-checking resources exist. Educational institutions, libraries and civil-society actors already work on different dimensions of digital competence and participation. I see little value in ignoring that work in order to manufacture a cleaner innovation story.

The harder question is what happens between the existing capacities.

A source-criticism exercise can teach someone how to inspect information. A fact-check can establish whether a specific claim is supported. Digital inclusion initiatives can help people gain access to technologies and services. Democratic education can create opportunities to understand institutions and forms of participation. Citizens encounter these issues together.

This is where my understanding of digital inclusion has become broader through the work around Digitalt Fællesskab. Access remains fundamental, particularly in a society where interaction with public institutions, communities and information is deeply digital. But meaningful inclusion increasingly involves what a person can do once access has been achieved. Navigating uncertainty is becoming part of that question.

The Danish misinformation numbers are useful because they prevent an easy diagnosis. They do not support a story in which Denmark is simply overwhelmed by false content. Nor do they give us a reason to dismiss citizens’ concern because one observed measure is relatively low. They point towards a less comfortable middle.

People can operate in a highly digital society while remaining uncertain about parts of its information environment. Synthetic political content can be relatively rare while suspicion of manipulation is much more visible. Resources for verification can exist without telling us whether citizens can translate verification into sufficient confidence to form a judgement.

For me, this changes the intervention question. The objective cannot simply be to make citizens more suspicious of digital information. Suspicion without a route back to judgement risks becoming another barrier.

The more useful task is to understand how people move through uncertainty: when they verify, how they decide that verification is sufficient, and whether they can continue from judgement into participation.

I do not think the Danish evidence gives us a complete answer yet. That is precisely why I am interested in this space.

Denmark already has many of the individual pieces. What remains less clear is how they connect in the experience of a citizen confronted with uncertain information in an actual democratic context.

Digital inclusion got us to the question of access. The next layer concerns confidence after access.

Not confidence that everything is trustworthy. Not permanent suspicion that nothing is.

Enough confidence to make a judgement and remain part of the democratic conversation.