Uncovering the uncoverers: identity, performativity and representation in counter-disinformation discourse

Abstract

ABSTRACT Treating counter-disinformation activities as a discursive practice producing knowledge in specific cultural and historical contexts, this article brings a vital cultural studies perspective to an incipient Critical Disinformation Studies agenda. At the same time, it cautions against inadvertently aligning that agenda with the ‘bad faith’, right-wing populist critique of counter-disinformation practices, acknowledging their genuine potential to enhance democratic culture. It proceeds by interrogating the communicative strategies informing the proliferating Western counter-disinformation initiatives which have mushroomed in response to what is widely perceived to be one of democracy’s most potent threats, and which border on a ‘moral panic’ serving to conceal key ideological tensions. Grounded in Critical Discourse Analysis methods, a close reading of mission statements and related materials from the websites of four leading counter-disinformation units demonstrates how these texts interweave three functions – identity construction, performativity, and representation – to generate the overarching ‘discursive formation’ or ‘articulation’ constituting counter-disinformation as modern liberal democracy’s core, but also exposing its fault lines. Specifically, it shows that a failure to reconcile competing accounts of truth (as scientific rationality and normative value) indexes deeper contradictions pitting the liberal emphasis on individual freedom and capitalist efficiency against the democratic prioritizing of popular power, dispassionate observation against civic participation, and the promotion of transparency against the creeping power of surveillance. It concludes that the absolutist epistemology – a vestige of disinformation’s Cold War conceptual origins – designed to cover over these paradoxes masks the complex roles played by truth and deception in politics, thereby hindering the emergence of alternative, oppositional forms of knowledge capable of embracing truth in its radical contingency and plurality and facilitating democratic renewal.