In recent years, fake news has become central to debates about the state and future of journalism. This article examines imaginaries around fake news as a threat to democracy and the role of journalism in mitigating this threat. The study builds on 34 qualitative interviews with Danish journalists, media experts, government officials, and social media company representatives as well as 42 editorials from nine national Danish news outlets. Drawing on discourse theory and the concept of metajournalistic discourse, the analysis finds that media actors mobilise fake news to support opposing discursive positions on journalism and its relationship with falsehoods. While some voices articulate established journalism and journalistic values, such as objectivity, as the antithesis to fake news, others blame contemporary journalistic practices for potentially contributing to misinformation, calling for change and reform. These contrasts are particularly notable between the public stances of editors-in-chief, expressed through editorials, and reflections based on personal experience from news reporters and media experts. The paper concludes that fake news functions as a floating signifier in Danish metajournalistic discourse, mobilised not only to attack or defend journalism, but also to present conflicting visions for what journalism is and ought to be.

This article presents a qualitative study of media discourses around fake news, examining 288 news articles from two national elections in Denmark in 2019. It explores how news media construct fake news as a national security threat and how journalists articulate their own role in relation to this threat. The study draws on discourse theory and the concept of logics to critically map how particular meaning ascriptions and subject positions come to dominate over others, finding five logics undergirding media discourses: (1) a logic of anticipation; (2) a logic of exteriorisation; (3) a logic of technologisation; (4) a logic of securitisation; and (5) a logic of pre-legitimation. The article concludes that fake news is constructed as an ‘ultimate other’ in Danish media discourses, potentially contributing to blind spots in both public perception and political solutions. This resonates with previous studies from other geo-political contexts, calling for further cross-national research.

Fake news has attracted significant global attention and contestation in recent years. This PhD thesis explores the explosive and oftentimes contradictory rise of fake news and dives into the discursive struggles around journalism, politics, digital media, and liberal democracy that have emerged in its wake. Through a series of interrelated publications – spanning more than five years of research – the thesis examines how and with what consequences journalistic and political actors articulate and dispute the very meaning of fake news. Through a careful and critical mapping of the discursive signification of fake news, the thesis does not only situate the issue in wider political and historical contexts; it also draws out and reflects upon its implications for the future of liberal democracies. 

Deploying detailed empirical investigations based on news content, textual analysis, and qualitative interviews, the thesis sheds light on discursive struggles around fake news within a number of distinct socio-political contexts. It dives into cases from the US and UK, where fake news first rose to prominence in 2016, as well as from Denmark, where fake news has increasingly become a topic of journalistic and political concern. 

Drawing on the ontological and conceptual framework of discourse theory, the thesis demonstrates how fake news has come to function as a floating signifier; it is a deeply political concept mobilised within conflicting hegemonic projects with fundamentally different forms of meaning. Having done so, the thesis goes on to show that fake news has not only become central in debates around lies and falsehoods but also for conflicting visions about what ‘politics,’ ‘journalism,’ and ‘liberal democracy’ fundamentally are and ought to be. Indeed, the core argument levelled in this thesis is that fake news has come to function as a prism through which wider struggles over liberal democracy and human co-habitation have become visible at a time of growing political instability. 

Taken together, the findings offered by the thesis contribute to the field of media and communication studies by addressing a pertinent gap regarding the discursive signification of fake news. Connecting the rise of fake news to structural transformations at the heart of both contemporary media landscapes and liberal democracy, the thesis moves beyond formalistic conceptions of fake news and into the highly conflictual terrain surrounding the concept.

Departing from Jessie Daniels’s 2013 review of scholarship on race and racism online, this article maps and discusses recent developments in the study of racism and hate speech in the subfield of social media research. Systematically examining 104 articles, we address three research questions: Which geographical contexts, platforms, and methods do researchers engage with in studies of racism and hate speech on social media? To what extent does scholarship draw on critical race perspectives to interrogate how systemic racism is (re)produced on social media? What are the primary methodological and ethical challenges of the field? The article finds a lack of geographical and platform diversity, an absence of researchers’ reflexive dialogue with their object of study, and little engagement with critical race perspectives to unpack racism on social media. There is a need for more thorough interrogations of how user practices and platform politics co-shape contemporary racisms.

This article explores the mimicking of tabloid news as a form of covert racism, relying on the credibility of an established tabloid newspaper. The qualitative case study focuses on a digital platform for letters to the editor, operated without editorial curation pre-publication from 2010 to 2018 by one of Denmark's largest newspapers, Ekstra Bladet. A discourse analysis of the 50 most shared letters to the editor on Facebook shows that nativist, far-right actors used the platform to disseminate fear-mongering discourses and xenophobic conspiracy theories, disguised as professional news and referred to as articles. These processes took place at the borderline of true and false as well as racist and civil discourse. At this borderline, a lack of supervision and moderation coupled with the openness and visual design of the platform facilitated new forms of covert racism between journalism and user-generated content.

Review of The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online Whitney Phillips & Ryan M. Milner, . Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2017. 240 pp. $69.95 hbk. $24.95 pbk. $19.99 ebk.

Disguised propaganda and political deception in digital media have been studied since the early days of the World Wide Web. At the intersection of internet research and propaganda studies, this chapter explores disguised propaganda on websites and social media platforms. Based on a discussion of key concepts and terminology, this chapter outlines how new modes of deception and source obfuscation emerge in digital and social media environments, and how this development complicates existing conceptual and epistemological frameworks in propaganda studies. The chapter concludes by arguing that contemporary challenges of detecting and countering disguised propaganda can only be resolved, if social media companies are held accountable and provide the necessary support for user contestation.