Mistranslating Deceit: Citizen Engagement with Disinformation in Poland, Romania, Serbia and Arabic-speaking Communities in the UK, 2025

This dataset forms part of the audience research strand of the AHRC-funded project (Mis)Translating Deceit: Citizen Engagement with Disinformation in Poland, Romania, Serbia and Arabic-speaking Communities in the UK. It comprises qualitative data collected through online focus groups conducted in four socio-linguistic settings: Poland, Romania, Serbia, and Arabic-speaking communities in the United Kingdom. The data capture how citizens in different cultural and linguistic contexts perceive disinformation as a social problem and how they interpret and engage with concrete examples labelled as disinformation by local fact-checking organisations. The dataset includes English-language transcripts of all focus groups, alongside supporting research materials such as participant information sheets, consent forms, the focus group protocol, a description of the disinformation examples used, and the coding schedule. Focus groups were stratified by generation and addressed media use, perceptions of misleading information, trust in news sources, and audience responses to disinformation related to the Russia–Ukraine war and LGBTQ+ rights. All data were collected, anonymised and processed in line with institutional ethical standards for research involving human participants.