IRIM and INCITEGov Insight into Organised Disinformation in Mongolia and the Philippines

Tracking the evolution of digital manipulation often means watching well-intentioned interventions clash with increasingly sophisticated adversaries. When the Action for Integrity and Democracy Against Disinformation project launched with the support of the Team Europe Democracy (TED) initiative in June 2025, the objective was to move beyond standard counter-disinformation measures by prioritising locally grounded analysis, evidence and responses. Over the course of the initiative, the Independent Research Institute of Mongolia (IRIM) and the International Center for Innovation, Transformation and Excellence in Governance (INCITEGov) implemented a rigorous process moving from baseline research to direct field operations.

The resulting documentation challenged a critical structural misconception: that digital disinformation in these shifting democracies is rarely a collection of random, organic falsehoods or misleading claims bubbling up from frustrated citizens. Instead, it is an organised, heavily financed supply chain functioning with marketing-like efficiency.

In the Philippines, INCITEGov’s analytical synthesis mapped a strict, hierarchical production infrastructure. Political dynasties, candidates, and state-linked actors function as the funders; public relations and advertising strategists act as the architects designing targeted campaigns; while digital influencers, coordinated troll farms, and unwitting grassroots volunteers serve as the distribution mechanism to push content into public feeds. From there, the noise migrates seamlessly from public platforms into private messaging applications and offline spaces. By the time a regular user scrolls past it, the manipulation is perfectly disguised as the authentic voice of their community.

A typical chain from “order” to “publication” is as follows:

[Political Funders] ➔ [PR & Media Strategists] ➔ [Influencers & Troll Farms] ➔ [Private Message Channels] ➔ [Offline Resurfacing]

This dynamic is structurally mirrored in Mongolia. IRIM’s quantitative tracking of 1,618 verified fact-checked items between 2020 and 2025 showed that disinformation spikes predictably around highly sensitive political moments. For instance, data collection coincided with an unprecedented political flashpoint when both the Prime Minister and the Speaker of Parliament were dismissed on the same day, causing an immediate freeze in official information channels and making sources highly cautious.

Political and state-linked actors leverage these precise moments of institutional opacity. They utilise “pocket websites” – an estimated 300 out of 390 registered news sites in Mongolia that feature no legitimate editorial structure and are effectively controlled by hidden funders – to launch reputation-management and narrative-smearing campaigns. Facebook accounted for a staggering 89% of this verified false or misleading content.

The behavioural and cultural reality check

The core value of this joint project lies in its empirical challenge to comfortable assumptions within the democracy-support sector. The first assumption it dismantles is that standard media and information literacy (MIL) training is a sufficient defence.

IRIM’s landmark Youth Vulnerability Study surveyed 400 young people aged 16–25 across urban and rural provinces (Ulaanbaatar, Tuv, and Khuvsgul), utilising an experimental Disinformation Vulnerability Index (DVI). The statistical analysis yielded a stark finding: self-assessed media literacy explained 0% of the variation in actual vulnerability. High confidence did not change the DVI baseline. What actually determined whether a young person believed or shared a manufactured narrative were deep-seated cognitive, motivational, and emotional factors, which combined to explain 27.9% of the variation.

The three factors that showed the strongest influence on vulnerability to disinformation were:

• Cognitive Capacity: The tendency to make rapid, intuitive judgements and accept claims as true without processing data or seeking alternative sources.
• Motivated Reasoning: Social conformity, strong resistance to correction when a claim aligns with existing group identities, and reliance on close peer networks, where 89.5% of respondents reported getting their daily news.
• Emotional Arousal: The presence of algorithmic triggers like fear and anger that drive rapid-sharing behaviours.

Crucially, these drivers are not uniform. In urban Ulaanbaatar, emotional arousal and rapid-reaction tendencies dominated. In rural settings, social conformity and a lack of verification alternatives played a significantly larger role.

Meanwhile, in the Philippines, INCITEGov shifted focus to a qualitative, hyperlocal segment in Iloilo Province: “The Online Ilonggo” – working-age, lower-income voters who are current or potential beneficiaries of government assistance (ayuda). Here, the research revealed that disinformation succeeds because it embeds itself within the harsh realities of daily economic survival. Livelihood pressures, family responsibilities, and immediate financial emergencies crowd out abstract political concepts. Information is consumed passively by “just scrolling” through Facebook.

Within this environment, political networks weaponise cultural norms. INCITEGov's focus groups detailed a deep-seated utang na loob (debt of gratitude) dynamic. When an individual or a family receives vital medical or cash aid facilitated by a local official, they often feel a personal, binding obligation to that political figure, even when they logically recognise that the aid is drawn entirely from public taxpayer funds. Disinformation thrives in the gaps of this opaque, personalised system, framing public assistance as an act of personal political generosity. The public frustration, as the focus groups revealed, is rarely about the existence of the aid itself, but about the profound lack of fairness and transparency in how beneficiaries are selected.

Reimagining resilience: the pilot deployments

Recognising that top-down, generic civic broadcasting cannot disrupt these networks, both organisations conducted co-design workshops with local stakeholders to translate their data into precise, localised field interventions.

In Mongolia, IRIM launched the “Nyagtaldag bol COOL” (“Checking is Cool”) campaign, deploying a training-to-peer-cascade model. Tailoring content by geography, they trained 78 youth leaders across three provinces. In Ulaanbaatar, the curriculum focused intensely on emotional self-regulation – teaching young people to pause and identify emotional manipulation before sharing. In rural provinces, it emphasised rigorous source evaluation, basic digital verification tools, and identifying AI-synthesised media.

Instead of walking away after the sessions, IRIM selected six peer educators and provided them with micro-grants to run decentralised follow-up initiatives. These youth-led information ambassadors ran localised school sessions, open digital content competitions, and local debates, successfully passing the skills on to an additional 262 young people and public officials in their own communities. Supported by a targeted digital campaign that generated over 600,000 views, the pilot demonstrated immediate, measurable gains in self-reported knowledge and analytical confidence.

In the Philippines, INCITEGov partnered with BUILD Pilipinas, a network of young social media creatives and civic communicators, to design and launch BUILD Iloilo – a hyperlocal, youth-led Facebook platform explicitly structured around a Social and Behaviour Change Communication (SBCC) framework. Operating with complete editorial independence, this pilot did not launch a blunt, confrontational anti-disinformation campaign. Instead, it positioned itself as a useful, reliable source of community information, introducing a lightweight but strict editorial workflow: Pitch then Produce then Verify, Review and Publish.

Through message-route testing, the team discovered that a confrontational, anti-politician frame (“Wag epal sa ayuda”) tested well for humour but risked immediately alienating less politically engaged audiences. Consequently, they adopted a non-confrontational, question-based “Inquisitive Influencer” tone, framing public assistance around citizen entitlement and objective fairness. Supported by 43 local volunteers and community correspondents, BUILD Iloilo produced 34 monitored, highly contextualised civic explainers and participatory content pieces.

Top-Performing Content Formats (Monitored Data):

1. Participatory Opinion Prompts (e.g., “If you could choose...”) ➔ 4,884 views
2. Procedural System Explainers (e.g., “What is AICS?”) ➔ 2,589 views

The team bypassed limitations in follower reach on the platform by systematically distributing their content across 155 established local Facebook groups, generating over 22,239 views and 1,433 direct group shares. The data yielded a major operational insight for practitioners: publishing volume is secondary to contextual framing. In July, the platform published 20 posts generating 6,626 views. In August, by cutting volume in half to 10 highly targeted, participatory posts, views climbed to 9,001 – indicating that audiences respond significantly better to localised utility and interactive prompts than to high-frequency broadcasting.

Key lessons for democracy support practitioners

The completion of the Action for Integrity project yields critical insights for the Team Europe Democracy network as it designs future information-integrity and democracy-support programmes:

• Anchor programming in community-specific evidence: Future initiatives should link macro-level democratic challenges with research into how they are directly experienced by specific audience groups. Data-scarce environments require initial funding to generate baseline evidence, while well-documented settings can leverage existing knowledge supplemented by focused, local research. This allows partners to tailor interventions to distinct information environments, civic realities, and local levels of public trust.
• Extend funding horizons to measure sustained behaviour change: The one-month pilots in Mongolia and the Philippines demonstrated operational feasibility and initial audience traction, but they represent starting points rather than finalised models. TED members should consider longer-term funding to allow local partners to consolidate their approaches, test them in additional locations, and evaluate whether early civic engagement translates into durable behavioural changes.
• Promote shared principles over rigid intervention models: TED should continue facilitating cross-regional knowledge exchanges while preserving local tactical flexibility. Instead of enforcing uniform intervention formats across diverse political landscapes, funding frameworks should anchor partners around shared operational values: political neutrality, robust safeguarding, editorial integrity, youth participation, and rigorous outcome measurement. This ensures global accountability while allowing local organisations the flexibility to navigate their immediate political and cultural realities.

IRIM and INCITEGov have proven that interventions can move beyond reactive fact-checking. By investing in localised research, respecting regional cultural constraints, and empowering embedded youth networks, they have provided a scalable template for building democratic resilience from the ground up. The ongoing challenge for international donors is to provide these organisations with the sustained operational support they need to turn these promising feasibility tests into durable barriers against organised manipulation.