Anxiety capture is reshaping disinformation in Europe

Across Europe, young men are being drawn into online communities that turn genuine frustrations about relationships, status, and identity into increasingly radical worldviews. New parents, grappling with the responsibility of keeping a child safe, are nudged toward risky health choices by influencers who validate their fears about food and medicine. Working families and farmers, feeling the pressure of rising costs and economic transition, are turning against climate policies that once looked settled.

These stories share a feature that changes how communicators should respond. In each case, people's real, deeply felt concerns are becoming the raw material for increasingly sophisticated forms of influence. The starting point is a legitimate anxiety, not a lie.

A shift from denial to capture

Public opinion has been shaped by misinformation for years, but the mechanism has evolved. Our research at Ripple Research, across tens of thousands of online interactions in seven European countries, points to a newer form. It takes a genuine, un-invented anxiety, loneliness, parental fear, economic insecurity, and attaches a specific, often misleading narrative to it. The primary goal is to harness a real emotion and direct it toward a chosen target; the spread of falsehood is a secondary tactic. We call this anxiety capture: identifying existing fears and perceived losses, giving them a compelling explanation, and connecting them to an identity, a cause, or a course of action.

In each pattern the underlying concern is real. Disinformation does not start the fire; it accelerates one that is already burning.

Why truth-telling reaches its limit

This creates a structural problem for the information-integrity field. When disinformation is the spark, truth identification, fact-checking, prebunking, media literacy, is the natural intervention. Those tools reach their limit when the starting point is a genuine, un-invented concern. The actors capturing these anxieties understand this intuitively. They lead with validation: you are right to be worried, we understand why, here is who is responsible, and here is what people like us must do. That sequence moves from lived experience to explanation to identity to action. It works because it performs a different function from truth-telling. Facts provide logic; anxiety capture provides meaning.

Truth identification remains the bedrock of democratic resilience, but it needs to be paired with proactive meaning-making. Fact-checkers can acknowledge the valid underlying anxiety when they correct the record, so the audience feels heard. Campaign teams can build messaging around the real frustrations a community is living, rather than abstract institutional goals. And policymakers can anticipate how a legitimate economic or social transition might be weaponised, and address the fear before it is captured.

The response: meet the concern, then move it

Our research led us to a practical framework for responding to these narratives before they harden. It begins with the anxiety the audience already feels, sets aside for a moment the message an organisation wants to deliver, and offers a different explanation for the same real concern, carried by voices the audience trusts. We tested it recently in a capacity-building session with more than 40 European organisations across 23 countries, and the consistent lesson was that starting from the underlying anxiety changes how teams design their outreach, letting them reach beyond their existing followers rather than speaking past them.