Fake News and Anthropology: A

Conversation on Technology, Trust, and

Publics in an Age of Mass Disinformation
February 16, 20201 comment

EMERGENT CONVERSATIONS: PART 9

A DISCUSSION WITH ANDREW GRAAN, ADAM HODGES, MEG STALCUP

Truth vs Post-truth by Martin Shovel

(https://twitter.com/martinshovel/status/804968341471457280).
This Emergent Conversation is part of a PoLAR Online series, Digital Politics, which will also
include a Virtual Edition with open access PoLAR articles. Anthropologists Adam Hodges,
Andrew Graan, and Meg Stalcup joined this virtual conversation to share their thoughts on fake
news, disinformation, and political propaganda. It was moderated by PoLAR Digital Editorial
Fellow Mei-chun Lee. The conversation will be published in three installments. This is Part I of
the discussion. Part II is available here and part III is here.

Mei-chun Lee: The first question I want to pose is how to define the problem space of so-called
“fake news.” After the Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. presidential election, fake news has
emerged as a political crisis that is believed to jeopardize democracy and even national security.
The Oxford Dictionary selected “post-truth” as the word of the year 2016 to describe
“circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than
appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Are we living in a world where truth no longer matters
and “truthiness”—“something truthish or truthy, unburdened by the factual” (Zimmer 2010)—
dominates? Is the very concept of “truth” being redefined by beliefs, relationships, and feelings?
Furthermore, how are we to understand the political impacts of fake news when on the one hand,
it is used as a weapon for politicians to discredit media reports that do not align with their best
interests (see Sullivan 2017), and on the other hand, more and more evidence shows that fake
news is just the tip of the iceberg in bigger disinformation campaigns?

Adam Hodges:  First off, I think it’s important to recognize that “fake news” as a term has
undergone substantial semantic change over the past few years. In the lead-up to the 2016 US
presidential election, the term “fake news” was used in the way we’re using it here—namely, to
mean false news stories disseminated under the guise of real news reporting.

Well before 2016, the term “fake news” mostly referred to satirical news shows, such as Comedy
Central’s “The Daily Show” or Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update.” These shows spoofed
the real news for comedic effect. During the early 2000s, Jon Stewart became known as “the
most trusted name in fake news.” “Fake news” in this usage context was meant for laughs.

Then came the 2016 presidential campaign with Russian troll farms and bot armies
disseminating false news stories aimed to mislead and misinform. “Fake news” in this usage
context had nothing to do with political satire and everything to do with the deliberate spread of
disinformation. In many ways, fake news in this sense was nothing new. False stories have long
been a central component of government propaganda used by authoritarian societies both within
and without to sow doubt and confusion. But now we saw misinformation deliberately aimed at
the US public, its efficacy amplified by social media.

So the US public talked quite a bit about “fake news” (in the sense of deliberately false stories)
in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Collins Dictionary even designated “fake news” its word of
the year in 2017. But Trump quickly appropriated the term and inserted it into a wholly different
usage context where he wielded the term against any news outlet or story that he perceived to be
critical of him or his policies. By April 2018, a poll by Monmouth University found that most
Americans understood “fake news” as not only applying to “stories where the facts are wrong”
but also applying “to how news outlets make editorial decisions about what they choose to
report.”
Within a short time frame, a new Trumpian meaning of “fake news” entered into widespread
usage, designating as “fake news” anything ideologically at odds with Trumpism. This meaning
has nothing to do with truth or falsity. It’s all about ideological fidelity and “truthiness.” The
irony, of course, is that while masquerading as an instrument for supposedly distinguishing
between truth and falsity, the Trumpian usage erodes trust in authentic news sites while elevating
the status of those sites that really do spread fake news.

So the news that portions of the public now accept as genuine or fake has less to do with the truth
value of the stories and more to do with the way the stories resonate with beliefs and feelings. In
my new book, When Words Trump Politics (2019), I refer to this as the “typification of a
worldview.” Erroneous information does political work for Trump by building a compelling
narrative that aligns with what his base of supporters “already know and accept as true regardless
of what the facts say.”

The problem with this trajectory as we head into the 2020 presidential election—not to mention
as we navigate the dueling realities of impeachment and its aftermath—is that we no longer
require interference from outside actors to spread disinformation and sow confusion. Americans
are now fully capable of generating and spreading our own fake news. In a recent segment on
National Public Radio, journalist Hanna Allam interviewed Bret Schafer, who studies
misinformation at the German Marshall Fund, noting that “the disinformation he sees these days
isn’t manufactured in a Russian troll farm. It starts as partisan spin or conspiracy theory on
American sites.”

Social constructionists have long recognized the social process behind the production of
knowledge and truth. In some ways, the “truthiness” of our current political moment is an
extreme example of that social process gone awry. Bruno Latour recently underscored how
“facts remain robust only when they are supported by a common culture, by institutions that can
be trusted, by a more or less decent public life, by more or less reliable media.”

With this in mind, I would say that our so-called post-truth era is more aptly conceptualized as a
post-trust era. The truthiness of Trumpian discourse and Russian disinformation campaigns both
have the similar effect of eroding trust in public institutions—from investigative journalism
(labelled “fake news”) to career government officials (labelled “the deep state”) to science itself
(labelling climate change “a hoax”). It is an erosion of trust in the skills and competencies
associated with networked communities of professionals—denigrated as “the elite” in Trump’s
brand of right-wing populism—that opens the door to a new social network of knowledge
producers with its own revered spokespersons (think Trump or Hannity) and means of
distributing their own truth claims (think Fox News or the Internet Research Agency).

In this era of fake news, the typical response is to double down on fact-checking and correcting
the record, as if the problem merely stems from a lack of correct information. Such a response is
based on the dubious premise that a baseline level of trust exists among the public—trust in fact-
checking journalists, trust in career government officials, trust in academics. But this approach
will inevitably fall short if that baseline level of trust is missing and continues to be eroded as
different sides cling to their own sets of facts and “alternative facts.” The antidote must therefore
focus on ways to stop the erosion of trust in public institutions and to rebuild the relationships
that those institutions are founded upon.

Andrew Graan:  Wow. Thanks, Adam, for launching the conversation! You offer such an astute
and useful dissection of the term “fake news.” And, I think that your diagnosis, viz., that fake
news is symptomatic of a shift in social trust, hits the nail on the head.

My own approach to fake news has been to situate the phenomenon—whether as a descriptor of
“deliberately false” news reports or as an epithet leveled against ideologically contrary news
items, to follow Adam’s distinction—within a broader framework of publics and publicity. 
Following work in linguistic anthropology, I conceptualize publics as what Susan Gal (2018)
eloquently phrased as a particular “social organization of interdiscursivity.” That is, publics are
constituted by the circulation and recontextualization of discourse but also by a set of
participation norms, metadiscourses and language ideologies that mediate how one (and thus
who) participates in public spheres (cf. Warner 2002).

This conceptualization, I believe, can help us understand the similarities and differences between
what we might call a “national news media public” and publics centered on—you name it—
BDSM, Biblical interpretation, the coding language Python, professional tennis, or celebrity
gossip. It is not simply that these publics center on different topics or themes, but that they are
“organized” differently. A sexually explicit vocabulary might get you expelled from a national
news public but might be required to participate in a public on BDSM. Genres of Christian
witnessing (Harding 2000) might be included in a public on Biblical interpretation but be
anathema to the default secularism of mainstream news.

So, where does fake news figure into all of this? I would like to suggest that fake news—both as
deliberately false news stories and as a political epithet—constitutes a particular way of
participating in a public. Let me explain.

For sometime now, we have lived in a world with professions that are dedicated to “engineering”
the discourses that circulate in publics and the ways in which participants take up these
discourses. This is the mission of marketing, public relations and brand management. They are
multi-modal professional practices that intervene in the public circulation of discourse in order to
motivate particular forms of popular uptake: a purchase, brand loyalty, a vote, a donation, an
endorsement. Specifically, these professions seek to advance preferred representations of some
object, whether a retail product, a firm, a political candidate, a humanitarian organization, etc.,
and to sanction or marginalize unfavored representations (e.g., through “damage control” in the
face of scandal or through legal apparatuses that adjudicate intellectual property claims, charges
of defamation, etc.).

I have analyzed such “discursive engineering” in my research on nation branding (Graan 2016). 
But, many other examples abound, including, I would argue, Douglas Holmes’ (2013) study of
the communication strategies deployed by central banks, Michael Lempert and Michael
Silverstein’s (2012) study of political advertising in the US, and Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan
Rosa’s (2015) analysis of hashtag activism following the tragic murder of Michael Brown by a
police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. In all of these cases, we see sustained, concerted efforts to
advance preferred representations of some issue and to challenge, marginalize or silence
unfavored representations. Such practices thus work to shape the public circulation of discourse
and even to re-shape or re-organize how discourse circulates in the first place.

From this perspective, I would argue, fake news is another form of discursive engineering. That
is, fake news, when considered as fabricated news reports, is the result of professional practices
that seek to shape the public circulation of discourse. The creators of fake news, whether
Macedonian teenagers (Graan 2018), American extremists (Marantz 2019), or Russian troll
farms (see Jessikka Aro’s posts), work to advance preferred representations of some issue. As we
know, these preferred representations are often sensational and salacious so as to be monetized
as “click-bait.” They might also serve malevolent efforts to spread “disinformation” and sow
distrust within a public. (Here I make the important disclaimer: just because practices of
discursive engineering seek to shape the public circulation of discourse doesn’t mean that they
always or often succeed. Just ask New Coke. I also tend to follow Masha Gessen and Adrian
Chen in arguing that the moral panic over Russian interference in the 2016 election exaggerates
the agency and power of the Russian state.)

In parallel, fake news, when considered as an epithet against ideologically contrary news reports,
can be seen as a practice of metadiscursive sanctioning. That is, it is a practice of policing a
public, of labeling some contributions as inappropriate to, or illegitimate within, a public. We
can see this on both sides of the political divide in the US. Again echoing Adam, those invested
in the liberal mainstream of American politics marshal accusations of “fake news” to
delegitimize fabricated news reports and to subject them to test by fact-checking. Those
supporting Trump’s neo-right populism level charges of “fake news” against news reports and
outlets deemed to be ideologically opposed to Trumpism. Thus, although the ideological and
moral principles of these sanctions differ significantly—one based on truth as fact verification
and the other on ideological fidelity to Trump—they nonetheless both function to police
participation in a public.

Obviously, at present, neither of these contrasting practices have achieved hegemony across
American news publics. That is, there is an open struggle between those who assert truth as fact
verification as a participation norm and those who assert truth as ideological and emotive fidelity
to Trumpism as a participation norm. This point dovetails with Adam’s on post-trust and the
bifurcation of American news publics organized around facts and “alternative facts,”
respectively. Indeed, the illusion of an integrated, American national news public seems to have
been eclipsed by what Arvind Rajagopal (2001) dubbed a “split public” in his analysis of the rise
of Hindu nationalism in India, that is, two publics claiming to represent one and the same
national space but organized by rival and “different languages of politics” (Rajagopal 2001, 25). 
Arguably, current popular discourses on silos, echo chambers and bubbles index and perpetuate
such a phenomenon, as James Slotta (2019) has explored recently in an excellent essay.

At any rate, by situating the fake news phenomenon in relation to publics, I feel we can learn a
few things. First, as Adam contended, fake news (understood as deliberately false news reports)
is not new.  Furthermore, I would add, it is also not exceptional. It is kindred with many other
practices of discursive engineering that intervene in publics in pursuit of instrumental ends. To
be sure, the difference in one’s goals matters. It is one thing to intervene in publics in pursuit of
social justice, or even in pursuit of commerce, and quite another to do so to foster confusion and
distrust. But, I do think it worth considering how fake news production is part of a larger type of
practice that is endemic to many contemporary publics.

Second, and to return to Adam’s point on fake news and the erosion of social trust, I would
simply add that when we see fake news as a technique of publicity, that is, of participating in a
public, it underscores how the social distrust that conditions fake news is also being organized
and reproduced through practices of publicity. That is, neo-right populism results not simply
from a wellspring of White discontent over lost entitlements and heightened precarity. Such
populism is also mediated. And specifically, it is mediated by practices of publicity that do not
merely express discontent and distrust but that also produce them.

“Disinformation. Fake news. You’re ready to vote. Go on!” by Gilmar.

(https://gilmar.blogosfera.uol.com.br/2018/09/25/a-quem-interessa-fake-news/)

Meg Stalcup:  Many thanks to both of you, Adam and Andrew. These are such substantive
analyses. It’s clearly a helpful prompt, Mei-chun! I like how you position us in a problem-space,
since to my mind that makes this squarely about the questions we’re asking. It seems especially
crucial to keep an eye on our questions, and to make doing so a methodological principle, when
“discourse engineering” (in Andrew’s great phrase) the news narrative is clearly part of the
phenomenon we’re studying. Whoever has the most extreme or shocking claim often shapes the
debate of the day, so we have to keep checking that the demand to which we are responding “is
indeed one with a palpable claim on us” (Scott 1997). Otherwise we’ll get caught up ourselves in
the reactive cycles that have much of the mainstream news media in the hands of whoever plays
that game best. Right now on the U.S. political scene, it’s the president, Donald Trump, and in
Brazil, where I work, it’s also the president, Jair Bolsonaro (the forum over at Cultural
Anthropology goes into this in depth).
I second Andrew’s point that fake news (in the sense of deliberately false stories) is often the
product of professional practices that intervene in publics: a kind of publicity. I first realized this
tracking down rumors about the Zika virus in Brazil (see the series of posts on Somatosphere),
analyzing them along classic anthropological lines, that in one way or another they represented
the voice of the people or symbolic substitution for a range of injustices. Then I realized (using a
variety of tools) that they were actually almost all clickbait. Someone was sitting around
translating the international conspiracy theories and making up local versions that linked to
monetized sites and YouTube videos. A lot of stories with the same bogeymen reappear with
every pandemic, including the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19). They are connected to
people’s concerns and fear, or hopes, although not as their “voice.” Instead, they present and
shape sentiments in the way a good advertising campaign does, because it knows its audience.

At the same time, as said above, fake news can also be one tactic in a broader disinformation
campaign. Journalists and academics have focused on computational propaganda in politics,
especially elections. But—and this connects with Adam’s point about the erosion of trust in a
wide range of public institutions—we know that there are devastating fake medical news stories
about vaccines, active disinformation campaigns on climate change, false anecdotes that
circulate in the wake of every major disaster. COVID-19 has reminded people of this, but it’s
striking that the reminder was necessary, given that the Zika events were only a few years ago.
I’ll just reiterate the more general point that the problem space of fake news includes many
significant domains, in addition to politics. It’s something to be kept in mind about conspiratorial
ecosystems, in the long term.

Adam and Andrew both bring up, in really fruitful ways, how fake news erodes social trust and
produces distrust.I do think that this happens, but for some people what’s going on is that
different relationships of trust have been established. Adam’s point about the importance of how
stories resonate with beliefs and feelings, perhaps over their truth value, has been a major part of
fake news debates, centered by the Oxford Dictionary post-truth definition that Mei-chun
mentioned. In my research, I’ve focused on these same themes, although at a somewhat different
intersection. I want to know how a story comes to resonate as true, and, conversely, the way that
what one opposes ideologically becomes understood as false. Clearly, this is just a subset of
what’s happening, but I think it’s an illuminating one. Only slightly facetiously, I’d say that fake
news has a “mode of truth”: its claims, like others, are made within a sphere or regime of
veridiction.

Part of what’s important in these spheres, and the “mediated practices of publicity” occurring in
them, is aesthetic. If you think about what’s circulating on social media, truth claims are at least
as likely to be made through images and sound—memes of photos with text or gifs or a comic,
spoken word in a video or audio recording—as through written text (which anyway also has an
aesthetic). So I’ve approached fake news as a form of aesthetic politics (Stalcup 2016), the
intentional deployment of aesthetics to political ends. A significant element of the infrastructure
in Brazil, but also in India, and a host of other countries, is the messaging service WhatsApp,
while in other places or for subpopulations it might be other platforms, each with their own
formative, technical capacities. WhatsApp, for example, allows for groups of up to 256 people.
Anyone can be an administrator if they create the group or are assigned the role and issue a URL
invite. All kinds of media circulate on WhatsApp—audios, videos, forwarded text messages,
images, urls to external sites and other groups, and the dominant aesthetic is memorable and
impactful. This style traces from early clickbait and the sensationalism of tabloids, which
increased as they competed with companies such as Facebook. If you think about memes or
cartoons, the opinions they’re presenting are right there. They are out in the open. And if that is
the aesthetic of truth for someone, professional journalism, particularly fact-checking, will not
read as true. Claims to objectivity won’t get read as balanced and fair but like the speaker is
hiding something, or dissembling. Adam’s identification of the problem of trust is central,
although in the “split public” case I am describing here, I see it as replaced rather than broken.
There were many fact checking initiatives during the Brazilian elections in 2018, but there was
already an aesthetic language trusted by a lot of people and it wasn’t what looks like serious
journalism. To be clear though, this is only part of the story. I also see the elements of the
aesthetics of professional journalism used online, co-opted even while it is mocked, mixed into
the same thread as the forthright declarations of partiality.

It’s fair to ask, as William Mazzarella (2017) has, if this is really a problem-space of truth. Are
trust and belief at stake, or is this a matter of affective engagement—in Mazzarella’s terms, the
enjoyment of efficacious resonance, or mana? Bolsonaro says outrageous things, the kinds of
things people repeat whether they agree with them or not. It’s stimulating, as is reading,
commenting, and forwarding media. To borrow a phrase from Dominic Boyer, as these media
move, they lay down “affective grooves” (2018). Even when the stories are false, the sensations
they produce are real. But I don’t think fake news is only about affective pleasure (some sort of
“invested intensity” might be better, since it can be agonizing to read critical comments of a
favorite celebrity or stressful to watch virulent diatribes, even if too mesmerizing and involving
to look away). I see these practices of participation as ways that people produce and enter into a
given mode of truth, a popular epistemology, not a replacement for truth or belief.