This article presents a typological study of the Twitter accounts operated by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a company specialized in online influence operations based in St. Petersburg, Russia. Drawing on concepts from 20th-century propaganda theory, we modeled the IRA operations along propaganda classes and campaign targets. The study relies on two historical databases and data from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to retrieve 826 user profiles and 6,377 tweets posted by the agency between 2012 and 2017. We manually coded the source as identifiable, obfuscated, or impersonated and classified the campaign target of IRA operations using an inductive typology based on profile descriptions, images, location, language, and tweeted content. The qualitative variables were analyzed as relative frequencies to test the extent to which the IRA’s black, gray, and white propaganda are deployed with clearly defined targets for short-, medium-, and long-term propaganda strategies. The results show that source classification from propaganda theory remains a valid framework to understand IRA’s propaganda machine and that the agency operates a composite of different user accounts tailored to perform specific tasks, including openly pro-Russian profiles, local American and German news sources, pro-Trump conservatives, and Black Lives Matter activists.

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.

The rapid rise of fake news as a ubiquitous signifier in global politics has caused widespread debate in democratic societies concerning the distinction between true and false. A number of media professionals and scholars have argued that we might be entering a dysfunctional post-truth or post-factual era in which facts move to the background of political decision-making. According to this position, democracy is shifting from a rational to an emotional political system, as politicians no longer concern themselves with the distinction between fake and real. In order to solve this crisis, facts need to be repositioned at the center of decision-making, enabling rational discussion and consensus-based solutions. As this paper argues, however, such a ‘post-truth antidote’ might not be as free and democratic as it seems on the surface. This theoretical paper critically examines the notion of the post-truth era and its underlying ideal of a fact-based democracy. Departing from Chantal Mouffe’s theory of agonistic pluralism, the paper discusses how the proposed solution of (re-)establishing fact-based democracy could result in less freedom of thought and expression. Following the theory of agonistic pluralism, the core value of any democracy lies in its ability to give voice to opposing groups and mitigate between them. What distinguishes democratic politics, then, from say a dictatorship is not the degree of consensus it can produce, but rather the degree of accepted disagreement it can contain. From this perspective, ideals of finding one true solution to any societal issue are inherently problematic, as they fail to acknowledge how decision-making always arise as the result of discursive struggles. Building on this theoretical foundation, the paper argues that the notion of a dysfunctional post-truth era fails to encapsulate contemporary politics, as it both implicitly and explicitly idealizes consensus and objectivity over freedom of expression and agonistic pluralism.

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.

Within the last decade, social network sites (SNSs) have come to play an increasingly important role in relation to both everyday and political life in Europe and North America. This gives rise to new forms of cultural and political participation, but also new modalities of manipulation. This paper explores how disguised propaganda on SNSs can be studied methodologically and analytically by combining multi-sited online ethnography (Hine, 2015; Marcus, 1998) and social media critical discourse studies (SM-CDS) (Khosravinik, 2017; Unger, Wodak, & KhosraviNik, 2016; Reisigl & Wodak, 2001). As numerous scholars have argued, SNSs should not simply be viewed as transparent or static platforms on which sociality unfolds (Langlois & Elmer, 2013; van Dijck, 2013). Rather, they represent contingent online spaces continuously shaped through the intermesh between social and technological processes. Political discourses on SNSs consequently require researchers to critically examine, not only how discourses are constructed within texts, but also how they arise through socio-technical discursive practices and processes. Based on a six-month multi-sited online ethnography, the paper discusses how participant-observational fieldwork and SM-CDS can be applied in conjunction to study the (re-)production and proliferation of racist discourses through fake SNS profiles. The study revolves around 11 Danish Facebook pages using fake Muslim identities to provoke Danish Facebook users. According to the pages, Muslims in Denmark are part of a conspiracy to take over the country, killing and raping non-Muslim Danes in the process (Farkas et al., 2017). In total, the pages received more than 20,000 comments, a majority of which expressed belief in the proclaimed authorship and aggression towards the pages and Muslims in general. The paper explores the socio-technical construction, maintenance, negotiation and contestation of racist discourses on these Facebook pages. Additionally, the paper discusses the methodological and analytical challenges of studying this type of online phenomenon. The paper concludes by arguing that multi-sited online ethnography can complement and enhance SM-CDS, although more scholarly work is urgently needed on this topic.

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.

This paper presents preliminary findings of a content analysis of tweets posted by false accounts operated by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St Petersburg. We relied on a historical database of tweets to retrieve 4,539 tweets posted by IRA-linked accounts between 2012 and 2017 and coded 2,501 tweets manually. The messages cover newsworthy eventsin the United States, the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack in 2015, and the Brexit referendum in 2016. Tweets were annotated using 19 control variables to investigate whether IRA operations on social media are consistent with classic propaganda models. The results show that the IRA operates a composite of user accounts tailored to perform specific tasks, with the lion’s share of their work focusing on US daily news activity and the diffusion of polarized news across different national contexts.

This article presents a mixed methods analysis of 4589 tweets posted between 2012 and 2017 by accounts connected to The Internet Research Agency in St Petersburg, a so-called ‘troll factory’ affiliated with the Russian government. The study departs from a list of 2752 deleted accounts, which Twitter handed over to the U.S. Congress in October 2017 as part of investigations into Russia’s potential meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections. By querying a historical database of tweets as well as the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the study examines a database of nearly 5000 tweets posted by 624 deleted IRA accounts. Tweets span a range geo-political and spatio-temporal contexts, including the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack in 2015. the Brexit referendum in 2016 and local news affairs in the US from 2014 to 2017. Tweets were manually coded based on 19 variables, developed through an inductive analysis of a sub-sample of tweets. Variables include geo-political context, national identity, endorsements or disapproval of political actors, fear-mongering, populist sentiments, emotional charge, polarization, hostility, conspiracy-theorization, and incitement of offline action. Drawing on propaganda studies, accounts were classified as either white, grey and black propaganda, encompassing identifiable, unidentifiable or disguised sources. The study finds that a majority of accounts were dedicated to disseminating black propaganda (53%, N=333) as opposed to grey (10%, N=62) or white propaganda (37%, N=229). Additionally, accounts with disguised sources (black propaganda) have significantly higher numbers of followers than grey and white propaganda accounts. In contrast, grey propaganda accounts consistently score higher than black and white for fearmongering (x̅=.44, .22, .01, respectively), populist sentiments (x̅=.31, .25, .02, respectively) and hostility (x̅=.26, .15, .01, respectively). The study concludes that propaganda classes can productively account for variances found in the studied data, with black and grey propaganda accounting for a majority of content sowing social discord and antagonism, disseminating polarized information, questioning public safety, and spreading rumors and conspiracy stories. Finally, the article discusses the broader political implications of state propaganda in the age social media, including the difficulties of studying and addressing the phenomenon.

Social media platforms have altered how social interactions take place online. This new era of user practices, micro-communication cultures, bots, and an increasing algorithmic shaping of sociability, opens up new research endeavours to understand how systemic racism articulates on social media platforms. Research points to the need of studying race, racism and other forms of systemic oppression as the result of user practices and technological mediation (Brook, 2009; Daniels, 2013; Massanari, 2015; McIlwain, 2016; Nakamura & Chow-White, 2012; Noble & Tynes, 2016; Sharma, 2013). However, access to data is becoming gradually scarce. This article unravels the methodological challenges involved in studying platform-articulated racism in a context of platform shutdowns of their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and in a moment when opaque apps like WhatsApp and WeChat are used as social platforms. Platforms, even though they are private entities, resemble public institutions in that they play a fundamental role in organising public discourse and people’s lives. Although platforms often allege that users have the possibility to opt out, the way social media is entangled in our everyday lives makes the prospect to leave the service only an option for a privileged few. Thus, platforms enactment and reproduction of racism is a matter of public concern rather than a market problem to be solved. Racism, therefore, is built into spaces (social media platforms) that go beyond our more traditional institutions (for example, the state, the school, the media). We argue that the obstacles facing empirical work on social media contribute to the reproduction and enactment of systemic racism. This article departs from an analysis of empirical studies of platform-articulated racism from 2013 to 2018 that have used social media data. Findings shows that this research face a range of interconnected and complex challenges. This includes: epistemological challenges (due to techniques of concealing, covert propaganda, cloaking, lack of authorship, etc.), lack of contextual knowledge (i.e. how can we understand what we observe on one social media platform without a larger context), lack of access to data (API limitations and opaque apps), and ethical challenges. Building on the presented findings, the article discusses overall limitations of the field, possibilities of overcoming these as well as future problems posed by increasing opacity and social media companies’ questionable arrangements to collaborate and support research.

Social media platforms have altered how social interactions take place online. This new era of user practices, micro-communication cultures, bots, and an increasing algorithmic shaping of sociability, opens up new research endeavours to understand how racism articulates on social media platforms. Research points to the need of studying racism and other forms of systemic oppression as the result of user practices and technological mediation. In the realm of social media, key technological features - such as anonymity, interactivity, connectivity and datafcation - are tactically exploited to create new modalities of ‘platformed racism’. However, access to data is gradually becoming scarce, as platforms increasingly close of their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), while new opaque platforms, such as WhatsApp and WeChat, pose challenges for empirical research. This article presents a literature review of 113 scholarly articles on racism and social media published between 2014 and 2018, collected through Google Scholar and Web of Science (of an initial sample of 270 articles). The article frst examines the geographical scope and overall methodologies described in the literature. Secondly, the article presents an in-depth analysis of the methodological and ethical challenges of studying racism on social media. Based on this analysis, the article critically discusses the overall limitations of the feld, possibilities of overcoming these as well as future problems posed by increasing opacity and social media companies’ questionable arrangements to collaborate and support research.

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.

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.

‘Fake news’ has emerged as a global buzzword. While prominent media outlets, such as The New York Times, CNN, and CBS, have used the term to designate misleading information spread through websites, President Donald Trump has recently used the term as a negative designation of these very ‘mainstream media’. In this article, we argue that the concept of ‘fake news’ has become an important component in contemporary political struggles. We showcase how the term is utilised by different positions within the social space as a means of discrediting, attacking and delegitimising political opponents. Excavating three central moments within the construction of ‘fake news’, we argue that the term has increasingly become a ‘floating signifier’: a signifier lodged in-between different hegemonic projects seeking to provide an image of how society is and ought to be structured. By approaching ‘fake news’ from the viewpoint of discourse theory, the paper reframes the current stakes of the debate and contributes with new insights into the function and consequences of ‘fake news’ as a novel political category.

Western societies are under siege, as fake news, post-truth and alternative facts are undermining the very core of democracy. This dystopian narrative is currently circulated by intellectuals, journalists and policy makers worldwide. In this book, Johan Farkas and Jannick Schou deliver a comprehensive study of post-truth discourses. They critically map the normative ideas contained in these and present a forceful call for deepening democracy. The dominant narrative of our time is that democracy is in a state of emergency caused by social media, changes to journalism and misinformed masses. This crisis needs to be resolved by reinstating truth at the heart of democracy, even if this means curtailing civic participation and popular sovereignty. Engaging with critical political philosophy, Farkas and Schou argue that these solutions neglect the fact that democracy has never been about truth alone: it is equally about the voice of the democratic people. Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy delivers a sobering diagnosis of our times. It maps contemporary discourses on truth and democracy, foregrounds their normative foundations and connects these to historical changes within liberal democracies. The book will be of interest to students and scholars studying the current state and future of democracy, as well as to a politically informed readership.

This research analyses cloaked Facebook pages that are created to spread political propaganda by cloaking a user profile and imitating the identity of a political opponent in order to spark hateful and aggressive reactions. This inquiry is pursued through a multi-sited online ethnographic case study of Danish Facebook pages disguised as radical Islamist pages, which provoked racist and anti-Muslim reactions as well as negative sentiments towards refugees and immigrants in Denmark in general. Drawing on Jessie Daniels’ critical insights into cloaked websites, this research furthermore analyses the epistemological, methodological and conceptual challenges of online propaganda. It enhances our understanding of disinformation and propaganda in an increasingly interactive social media environment and contributes to a critical inquiry into social media and subversive politics.

This research examines how fake identities on social media create and sustain antagonistic and racist discourses. It does so by analysing 11 Danish Facebook pages, disguised as Muslim extremists living in Denmark, conspiring to kill and rape Danish citizens. It explores how anonymous content producers utilise Facebook’s socio-technical characteristics to construct, what we propose to term as, platformed antagonism. This term refers to socio-technical and discursive practices that produce new modes of antagonistic relations on social media platforms. Through a discourse-theoretical analysis of posts, images, ‘about’ sections and user comments on the studied Facebook pages, the article highlights how antagonism between ethno-cultural identities is produced on social media through fictitious social media accounts, prompting thousands of user reactions. These findings enhance our current understanding of how antagonism and racism are constructed and amplified within social media environments.

Based on 18 qualitative interviews, this article explores how the social media managers for the nine parties in the Danish parliament articulate the role of social media during the 2015 national elections. The article finds that the interviewees emphasise Facebook as an important means for one-way political communication and the monitoring of public opinion. The majority of the interviewees articulate a sense of responsibility for facilitating public debate on Facebook through the moderation of user-generated content and/or interactions with users. Yet the social media managers do not systematically analyse political input from social media users, nor do they see Facebook and Twitter as viable means of citizen influence on political decision-making. This is explained by a perceived lack of voter representativeness among Facebook users, fear of appearing politically imprudent and scepticism towards social media’s participatory potential.

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.

In 2018, Malmö University is celebrating its 20th anniversary with lectures, conferences, popular science talks, debates and exhibitions. In this exhibition, the library presents research from Malmö University’s five faculties. Research is a complex process, which questions, investigates and develops new aspects of the world. In this way, research fields are constantly moving forward. Results are disseminated in many ways, for example through scholarly publication, collaboration, researcher networks or exhibitions. When research findings reach a wider audience, they are presented in a simplified form and often out of context. This means that research findings presented in the media are often misinterpreted. Individual findings are part of a greater whole and are therefore not well suited for news headlines. This exhibition highlights the importance of reviewing information critically and encourages the visitor to think about whether you relate to news with your reason or with your emotions. Malmö University partakes in the VA (Public & Science) campaign #hurvetdudet (Eng.: How do you know that?). The aim of the campaign is to increase the knowledge of politicians and the public about what science is, how it is done, how different research findings can be evaluated and why research-based knowledge is needed as a basis for decisions about the development of society.