Fake News in Digital Cultures: Technology, Populism and Digital Misinformation

The Spectre of Populist Leadership: QAnon, Emergent Formations, and Digital Community

“…While this drawing together of disparate social factors into a worldview is, indeed, one way in which to read QAnon, we suggest that conspiracy theory may be too imprecise a label for QAnon due to the ways in which it has mechanised political, violent, and electoral action among its adherents. This makes it substantially different from conspiracy theories such as the Moon Landing hoax, the Flat Earthers, the Illuminati, and New World Order conspiracy claims, or the X-Files-style "deep state" claims, all of which are about giving adherents a sense of control over things which appear outside their immediate capacity to trust but otherwise not calling on personal intervention (Cover et al, 2022)-That is, no one is motivated to attack NASA headquarters to expose that the moon landing was a lie; rather, they such conspiracy theories inspire a sense of mystery without outrage. In this respect, QAnon is more closely aligned with the right-wing populist movements in the form in which they have emerged in the past decade: Adherents do not merely articulate that non-adherents have been "fooled" by a conspiracy, but that they are motivated through outrage to generate action.…”

“…The combination of persistent repetition of messages and the active sense of community building among those who share, re-circulate, comment upon, and build upon those messages is key to the contemporary success of populism (Mangerotti et al, 2021). What is key here, however, is that despite the proliferation of active voices, contestations and debates that mark social media and digital communication channels, the leader remains the vocal authority on political or social issues in their simplistic, sensationalist, and appealing rhetoric and use of disinformation (Cover et al, 2022) while dissenting arguments are dismissed as "fake news" or "biased" criticism (Farhall et al, 2019;Haw, 2021). Indeed, social media has presented affordances to 21st-century populisms that re-position the figure of the leader as less reliant on being an "empty signifier" available for widespread identification by the people.…”

“…Furthering our understanding of QAnon's reversal of the recognised practices of populist movements is significant given the identification of QAnon by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation as a domestic terror threat (Barr & Pecorin, 2021), the normativisation of QAnon discourse through fake news channels (Cover et al, 2022), and the mainstreaming of QAnon ideas within the US Republican Party (Rosenberg & Haberman, 2020). Identifying QAnon's distinctive practices of leadership and the ways in which this emerges from the logic of contemporary digital culture rather than concrete digital networks or political discourse helps identify QAnon not as a unique accident but as constituted in contemporary culture.…”

Remedying disinformation and fake news? The cultural frameworks of fake news crisis responses and solution-seeking

“…There is a substantial public and scholarly discourse describing the emergence of fake news as a contemporary ‘crisis’ (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017; Haw, 2021; Mara, 2019; McNair, 2017; Tandoc, 2019); including as a cultural formation (Cover et al, 2022; Waisbord, 2018). Further work, however, is needed to understand how the framework of crisis and normative rupture has been deployed to position it as a problem requiring solution.…”

“…‘Fake news’ is an emergent cultural term that, from the mid-2010s became widely used in everyday public discourse to describe a range of problematic media texts, content, forms and behaviour, including disinformation (deliberately misleading or biased information and propaganda), misinformation (unintentional sharing of misleading or false information), and other forms of fabricated information mimicking news or factual content (Cover et al, 2022). Although there is a long history of public reaction to – and scholarship about – propaganda and media bias (Jackall, 1995), fake news operates as a new phase in misleading media content in three respects: (i) its association with interactive, digital platforms; (ii) the widespread public concerns that emerged since 2016 across opinion and news reports, particularly in relation to electoral politics and health communication; and (iii) the way in which it has been positioned as an ‘alien’ formation, producing a perceived ‘crisis’ that warrants solutions and remedies.…”