Disinformation and Identity(-based Features) in Political Communication Research^[1]

 

Marília Gehrke, University of Groningen

Olga Pasitselska, University of Groningen

https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-98563-6, PDF

 

Introduction: Why identity-based disinformation matters and what the political communication field is doing about it

Over the past ten years, the politics of identity has become prominent in polarized and contested media environments (Fukuyama, 2018). Political actors strategically exploit identity narratives to construct a shared understanding of political reality grounded in animosity towards “the other” (Reddi et al., 2023). False and misleading content, produced to delegitimize women and people of color (or the intersection of both), contributes to the exclusion of social groups historically left behind in the political decision-making process (Gehrke, 2023; Sobieraj, 2020). On the side of media use, the persistence of ideologically loaded identity categories in (social) media discourses deepens societal divides and leads to affective polarization (Pasitselska, 2022).

While the concept of identity seems to lie at the core of the current information disorder, including misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda (Klinger et al., 2024), political communication research does not pay sufficient attention to the role of social identities and groups in political communication and politics generally (Chakravartty et al., 2018; Freelon et al., 2023a; 2023b; Knüpfer et al., 2024; Grover & Kuo, 2023). In addition, scholars from the Global South would rarely receive international visibility in the field had they stayed in their home countries; their voices are often heard because they are affiliated with Global North universities (Rossini, 2023). In this short essay, we aim to draw the attention of the political communication community to the emerging strings of research that require further cultivation, given their potential to address the most pressing problem of political communication in the years to come.

Despite the recent plea to diversify the field of mis- and disinformation studies and political communication (Knüpfer, Jackson & Kreiss, 2024) by accounting for historical inequalities (Kuo & Marwick, 2021; Thakur & Hankerson, 2021) and expanding the scholarly work toward gender (Camargo & Simon, 2022; Veritasia et al., 2024) and race (Coles & Lane, 2023), scholars have yet to keep up with these fundamental debates. Whereas a few researchers have engaged in how to conceptualize gendered disinformation (see Bardall, 2023), the phenomenon remains understudied, mainly in traditional spaces such as academic peer-reviewed journals. In contrast, reports produced by researchers either connected with university-level centers or non-profit organizations have gained traction (see Jankowicz et al., 2021; Judson et al., 2020; Scott, n.d.). When it comes to communicating findings broadly, non-academic organizations are also at the lead of relevant discussions in webinars (e.g., EU DisinfoLab), commentaries (see Di Meco & Wilfore, 2021), and news (Eisele, 2024). Finally, the political communication community still struggles to address the overwhelming presence of white men in academic citations (Chakravartty et al., 2018; Freelon et al., 2023a; 2023b).

To substantiate our claim that political communication research does not pay sufficient attention to identity-based disruptive communication, we have counted identity-related keywords of the Political Communication divisions’ panels of the two major conferences – the International Communication Association (ICA) and the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA). We have manually searched the programs of 2024 ICA and ECREA for keywords that could indicate identity-based topics, such as “gender”, “race”, “identity”, and “diversity” in the titles. Words that could work as a proxy for one of those topics were also taken into account (e.g., “white” as a proxy for “race” and “misogyny” as a proxy for articles related to “gender”). We recognize the limitations of this simplistic approach, but we nevertheless believe that there is merit in a keyword overview of the flagship scholarship of our field.

The ECREA Political Communication division had 28 sessions with three to five papers each, totaling 135 contributions. Among these, only 10 (7.4%) covered gender, race, identity, and minority issues explicitly in their titles. Whereas gender and race are usually covered in demographics in research designs, particularly the ones with surveys or experiments related to predicting behavior, diversity was not really central (or something that mattered enough to be highlighted in the titles). Even when scholars were studying negative campaigning online or hate speech, it did not translate into more focus on gender and racial issues – at least not in the title.

The ICA Political Communication division had 42 sessions of various lengths, including joint panels with other divisions, and special sessions and workshops (184 contributions in total). Interestingly, the identity-based issues were addressed mainly in specially allocated sessions. In this way, there was one session devoted to “Analyzing Race Talk in Institutional Settings,” one session discussing “Gender and Political Communication,” and another session about “Elections: Identity, Framing, and Media.” Otherwise, these issues were scarcely mentioned in the titles (three mentions of identity and two of diversity, no mentions of gender, and one mention of race beyond the specially allocated sessions). Overall, this accounts for 13 (7%) contributions covering gender, race, identity, and minority issues in their titles.

While this “high density” approach of grouping together presentations on race and gender provides visibility to these problems, it also might convey an impression that identity-based issues should be addressed within the dedicated scholarly enclaves such as “gender studies” rather than by the field as a whole. Different types of information disorder (mis- and disinformation, polarization) were often associated with partisanship in the titles (16% of contributions in information disorder panels were devoted to partisanship), and it would be interesting to explore whether partisanship is indeed representative of a “meta-identity” that subsumes other social identities (Klinger et al., 2024) and is used for production and negotiation of “othering” in societies.

 

Literature review: Three important concepts to keep in mind

Recent reviews of political communication scholarship that studies propaganda and disinformation point to two persistent problems in how the field understands these phenomena. First, much of the existing literature remains primarily concerned with epistemological aspects of disinformation production and reception (Kreiss, 2021). Second, political communication in general, and engagement with disinformation more specifically, is seen as an individual process, discounting the importance of social identities and social negotiation of shared meanings (Grover & Kuo, 2023). To add to the political communication scholarship into the debate that accounts for the relationship between power, inequality, race, gender, and other identities, several conceptual frameworks have been developed recently (Gehrke, 2023; Pasitselska, 2022; Reddi et al., 2023). In this short review, we want to highlight three useful concepts that should be further applied in empirical research to adequately analyze the strategies employed by political actors to underline social divisions as well as audiences’ negotiation and reception of ideologically loaded messages. These are the following:

1. Identity Propaganda
2. Logics of Exclusion
3. Gendered Disinformation

Identity Propaganda

We want to start with the concept of identity propaganda, defined as strategic narratives that target and exploit identity-based differences to maintain existing hegemonic social orders and/or undermine challenges to extant political power (Reddi et al., 2023). Successful deployment of identity propaganda is tightly linked to the view of politics through the lens of resentment and victimhood (Cramer, 2016). It counterposes an information-based understanding of democracy (e.g., Schudson, 1999) to an identity-based view that emphasizes the importance of perceived group membership over political attitudes and beliefs, and policy preferences. So, instead of seeing citizens as seeking out information about candidates and making informed decisions, this “group theory of democracy” places social identity and attachments at the core of democratic processes and conceptualizes partisanship as a meta-identity.

There is a clear link between this scholarship and previous studies on the discursive construction of national identity (Wodak et al., 2009) that relies on Benedict Anderson’s and Stuart Hall’s conceptualizations of national identity as the product of discourse. Much of this emerging work builds from social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1986), which details how social and cognitive processes and intergroup relations produce group formation and cohesion (Bar-Tal, 2013). The research on identity propaganda has looked into the construction of narratives over shared grievances and collective traumas (Sharafutdinova, 2022) that can constitute a powerful rhetorical device, recasting certain groups as enemies, or supporting inclusive unifying categorizations in the so-called populist rhetoric (Pasitselska & Baden, 2020). Applying this conceptualization, further empirical research can help understand the spread and persistence of strategic narratives that are based on social identity and partisan division.

Logics of Exclusion

The next concept we underscore here is logics of exclusion, defined as the dynamics of selection and exclusion of claims that set the stage for clarification of meanings and construction of identities and social hierarchies during meaning negotiation (Pasitselska, 2022). This concept can aid the research dealing with reception of identity propaganda. By empirically tracing logics of inclusion and exclusion of claims, we can understand how media frames are retained or challenged and renegotiated in the discussion. Drawing on conversation analysis and deliberation studies, further empirical research can expand our knowledge of how interpersonal interaction facilitates the spread of propagandistic narratives, or limits their power, depending on the characteristics of the social environment. By studying the meaning of negotiation in different contexts, we can further learn how particular interpretations of political content “stick” or resonate with certain audiences (Baden & David, 2018). One promising direction is the research on social corrections in online debates (Kligler-Vilenchik, 2022) from a socio-technological perspective. Logics of exclusion can explain how claims are selected as valid or discarded in the process of social negotiation in chat groups, threads, or comment sections. Combining this with the inquiry into the affordances of online environments can permit a more holistic understanding of user-driven correction of mis- and disinformation, while keeping an eye on algorithmic curation and platform architecture.

Gendered Disinformation

The third concept we highlight here is gendered disinformation. Jankowicz et al. (2021, p. 1) define it as “a subset of online gendered abuse that uses false or misleading gender and sex-based narratives against women, often with some degree of coordination, aimed at deterring women from participating in the public sphere. It combines three defining characteristics of online disinformation: falsity, malign intent, and coordination”. Similarly, Bardall (2023) describes it as a subset of violence against women in politics with the underlying goal that women should be removed from public spaces and any opportunities to reach societal power. Nevertheless, even though gender and race are socially constructed categories, the intersection of such attributes should be considered in further analyses. For instance, when examining the disinformation narratives that had Brazilian female politics as the main target, Gehrke (2023) identified that race and ethnicity played a role in the type of attacks intended for minoritized women, namely their alleged links with criminality or different moral expectations.

 

Conclusion, follow-up questions, and reflection on our own biases

“The field of Political Communication is presently unprepared to meet the threats of illiberalism and the far right” is the diagnosis presented by Knüpfer et al. (2024, p. 1). Based on the white and male homogeneity of voices in the political communication field, which has revolved around the U.S. and European scholars’ normative concerns, the authors argue that the field is not sufficiently equipped to deal with the advances of far-right movements and its rejection of pluralistic democratic societies. The far-right politicians construct “others” to be blamed, and these “others” – an attempt to outsource societal and economic issues – are usually based on identity aspects such as gender, race, and ethnicity. This includes far-right politicians evoking rhetorical strategies related, for instance, to “reverse racism” (Ma, 2024).

“Othering” is a key rhetorical move of identity propaganda that can be studied both in the top-down elite communication, and the bottom-up users’ discourse and negotiation of strategic narratives. Constructing the “other” by the activation of gender and race stereotypes often elicited by far-right movements in fabricated narratives has been observed among those who study gendered disinformation. Thus, the theoretical framework employed by decolonial feminists such as Gonzalez (2020) and ​​Vergès (2021) has been helpful to account for inequalities once they acknowledge that not all women face the same struggles. While the so-called Global North was concerned about granting voting rights to women, women in countries with a colonial history still struggle with the basics: having access to work and income, thus freedom without violence.

Given the field’s preoccupation with “partisan” polarization, we pose the question of whether partisanship is a meta-identity beyond the US context. We argue that gender, race, and other social identities should be taken more seriously when analyzing current political communication. Based on our analysis of the ECREA and ICA Political Communication divisions, we observed that even though there is an attempt to keep up with these challenges by creating specific panels to discuss identity-based topics in relation to the field, this practice binds these discussions to the pre-existing research enclaves. In other words, scholars who were already concerned with diversity are those who discuss these issues with peers sharing the same concerns. Therefore, it becomes a challenge to expand the debate to shift the direction of the field as a whole. In this respect, our own methodological choice is a fair blind spot: We only considered the English-speaking divisions of two major associations, but what are we missing in other countries and contexts?

 

 

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Marília Gehrke is an Assistant Professor of Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Groningen, Netherlands, and a fellow at the Digital Democracy Centre (DDC), University of Southern Denmark, Denmark. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication and Information at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil. Her main research interests are (gendered) disinformation and (data) journalism. 

Olga Pasitselska is an Assistant Professor of Social Media and Politics at the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. She has obtained her PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Her research focuses on reception of propaganda in conflicting environments, media trust, and grassroots civic engagement. 

 

[1] Copyright © 2024 (Marília Gehrke and Olga Pasitselska). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at https://politicalcommunication.org.

 

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