The time of "fake news" is over; "disinformation" has taken its place
This introduction to the special issue “Beyond Fake News: The Politics of Disinformation” contains four main sections. In the first, the authors discuss the major sociopolitical factors that have allowed disinformation to flourish in recent years. Second, they review the very short history of disinformation research, devoting particular attention to two of its more extensively studied conceptual relatives: propaganda and misinformation. Third, they preview the seven articles in this issue, which they divide into two types: studies of disinformation content and of disinformation reception. The authors conclude by advancing a few suggestions for future disinformation research.
Moral outrage and shared moral norms energize networked, coordinated harassment online
Networked, coordinated harassment is done by all kinds of communities, from partisan political groups to fandoms. Though the origins of harassment are not necessarily identity-based, the resulting attacks use race, gender, sexuality, religion, and other attributes as vectors, making it more likely that people with marginalized identities will be harassed in ways that are intersectional/more harmful for individuals with multiple marginalized identities.
The key point is that while harrassers draw from identity-based stereotypes in their attacks, they understand their actions as morally justified and based in the target’s actions, rather than their identity. Marwick offers two examples, “I’m not against Anita Sarkeesian because I’m a misogynist/anti-feminist, but because she’s a scammer/liar,” and “I’m not against the 1619 project/Nikole Hannah Jones b/c I’m racist/my white ID is threatened but because she’s a liar who hates white people and white children.” In these cases, the speaker justifies their harassment of women by defining the woman as immoral and themselves therefore as moral actors for policing their immoral behavior.
Policymakers' stated ideals for digital democracy often uphold utopian standards that depart from the empirical reality
This study provides a comparative survey of policy-making discourse in the United Kingdom and the United States from 2016 to 2020 around digital threats to democracy. Through an inductive coding process, it identifies six core ideals common in these two countries: transparency, accountability, engagement, informed public, social solidarity, and freedom of expression. Reviewing how these ideals are constructed in policy-making documents, the authors find differences in each country's emphasis, inconsistencies in how some democratic ideals are evoked and promoted, conflicts between different democratic ideals, and disconnects between empirical realities of democracy and policy-making discourse. There is a lack of clarity in what social solidarity, engagement, and freedom of expression mean and how they should be balanced; conceptions of an informed public are deeply fraught, and in tension with other ideals. We argue that policy-making discourse is often out of step with the growing literature which suggests that political conflicts between social groups, right-wing extremism, and antidemocratic actions increasingly taken by elites and parties are at the root of growing democratic crises. This state of policy-making discourse has important implications for attempts to pursue regulation and suggests the need for further reflection by policymakers on the democratic ideals they are solving for.