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Abstract
This essay advocates a critical approach to disinformation research that is grounded in history, culture, and politics, and centers questions of power and inequality. In the United States, identity, particularly race, plays a key role in the messages and strategies of disinformation producers and who disinformation and misinformation resonates with. Expanding what “counts” as disinformation demonstrates that disinformation is a primary media strategy that has been used in the U.S. to reproduce and reinforce white supremacy and hierarchies of power at the expense of populations that lack social, cultural, political, or economic power.
Highlights
A great deal of research suggests that disinformation narratives build on and reify pre-existing ideologies, frequently involving race and inequality (Freelon et al, 2020; Nkonde et al, 2021; Ong, 2021)
Drawing from principles established by the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, we argue that analyses of disinformation are more effective when they include: 1. Grounding disinformation studies in history, society, culture, and politics; 2
A truly critical approach to disinformation studies must take into account that deliberately false information is culturally and politically specific; analytic concepts developed in the U.S may limit our understanding and proposed solutions, as the forms of inequality leveraged and furthered by disinformation are deeply contextual (Marwick et al, 2021)
Summary
Knowledge and information production is an active process that is political, serving and benefitting specific interests. The West justified such practices by producing racist pseudoscience that naturalized colonial practices, set itself in a superior position of power, and justified the expansion of its empire (Said, 1978; Saranillio, 2018) Viewing disinformation through this lens of power and knowledge production illuminates how knowledge is used to justify racial divisions and structural inequality—both historically and in the present. Viewing disinformation through a historical lens demonstrates how, beyond explicitly malicious intent, disinformation narratives are frequently used by politicians to produce tacit public acceptance of policies instantiating inequality Disinformation such as anti-Black, misogynistic and antipoor stereotypes like the “welfare queen” and anti-immigrant narratives about “invaders'” taking away jobs and resources have accompanied huge reductions in public benefits (Covert, 2019). Examining how contemporary disinformation is bound up with such longer histories highlights that information spreads and operates in ways that disproportionately harm already marginalized communities
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