Affective Contexts Worldwide

Abstract

To better understand the mechanics of how false information challenges the health of the civic body, this chapter explores the economics of emotion (the optimisation of datafied emotional content for financial gain) and the politics of emotion (the optimisation of datafied emotional content for political gain) under different affective contexts worldwide. It starts by examining elections in the USA, given its politically affectively polarised population, its media polarisation and long experience of emotive electoral disinformation on social media. It then turns to the Philippines, given its affective patronage democracy, clientelism and extremely high social media usage. This is followed by examining Sweden, a country that should be resilient to false information given its strong civic institutions, but that has witnessed a breakdown of consensus culture initiated by the emergence of right-wing populist nationalist political parties and supporting online media. These examples provide a grounded sense of the scale and dynamics of false information media systems. They highlight the importance of understanding specificities of affective contexts, and their intersections with international information flows such as information warfare, ideological struggles and resources for content moderation by global platforms.