From concern to action: studying disinformation at UniTartu Summer School 25.09.2026

Author: Undercliff Creative

I'm Andy Sturt, and I joined the "Strengthening Democracies: Building Resilience and Resistance to Information Disorders" course in the long hot summer of 2026. It was a fantastic course, and when asked to write a few thoughts on the experience, I jumped at the chance.

I have been interested in the impact of disinformation ever since the Brexit referendum in 2016. After the shock vote, reporters visited areas that had voted heavily for Brexit to ask why people had voted as they did, and the answers often made little sense to me. Those interviewed pretty much always pointed to stories repeatedly shared with them on social media. Without realising it, they had been immersed in a wave of heavily biased, misleading and often completely false "information". Since then, I have seen the growing number of news stories about disinformation and have become increasingly concerned about their impact on our democracy and the success of those trying to undermine it.

In the last few months, I've been able to step back a little from my hectic career in data science, giving me enough time to engage with the issue more actively. After reading several books and articles, I realised that I wanted a more solid grounding in the topic. It was also clear that countries that had lived through Soviet occupation were much more actively engaged in combating disinformation: they had had to cope with a continual bombardment of disinformation and manipulation from Russia. Estonia stood out as a leading country in this field. That's when I found the summer course run by the University of Tartu to which I eagerly applied and was accepted.

The course is a fantastic taster covering the full breadth of elements in the subject area, from educational interventions to the use of OSINT (open-source intelligence). Along the way, there are fun topics such as conspiracy theories (some of them are wild; just ask your lizard overlords!) as well as weightier topics like the civil/military organisation designed to respond when necessary. The way the course is structured encourages immersion: reading academic papers, lectures by the expert team, hands-on exercises and guest speakers offering diverse perspectives, including military and Big Tech.

As a more mature participant, I was a little apprehensive of joining a university course knowing that most of my cohort would be much younger than me, but I needn't have been. Across the summer courses, there was a wide range of backgrounds, ages and nationalities, and my immediate peers were super friendly, with lots of different perspectives that really added to the lectures.

Tartu in the summer is such a relaxed and accessible place that it's easy to hang out together socially, to join in as much or as little as you feel like on any particular day. The university-organised socials were also great to get to know people on different courses and to explore Tartu. It's difficult to imagine an easier place to be a foreigner for a few weeks.

I'm not at the stage of my life that would allow me to spend a year on the master's course that might naturally follow on from the summer school, even though it was an attractive option. Instead, I've signed up to continue my education in the UK and hope to be able to put my data science skills to good use, fighting the good fight wherever I can!

I would encourage anybody with an interest in this topic, or any of the topics offered by the university, to just jump in and enjoy!