Academic

This disinformation crisis is examined across many fields and disciplines, with much work in media studies focused on the role of technology and communications in manipulating how problematic information flows. Explorations into algorithms, echo chambers, bots, and data analytics reveal how social media prioritises engagement over factual content (Benkler et al., 2018). This work has unmasked troll armies organised by the political elite to create distractions in their home countries (Jing, 2016). Similarly, scholars in the Philippines have done extensive work to uncover the hierarchical “architects of networked disinformation” (Ong and Cabanes, 2018, p.2) that work for financial incentives and political clients following the win of Duterte in 2016 presidential elections. These revelations uncovered the digital labour of disinformation work.

Though undoubtedly crucial in understanding digital disinformation, Cabañes argues that this “information-oriented” approach is imbalanced and limited in that it doesn’t address the “key communicative” truths at the root of disinformation that help us understand why people become vulnerable to false narratives (2020, p.436). It diminishes our view of audiences as “simplistic” (Cabanes, 2021, p.444). Similarly, Xia (2021) argues that we need to understand what elements “shape their engagement with facts or falsehoods” to uncover “how exactly does problematic information, disseminated intentionally or not, matter to them” (p.1371). These questions provide the impetus for my research. That is, I wish to uncover the factors that influence the ways audiences interact with disinformation. I take an audience studies approach to map users’ media behaviours and their experiences with networks that are “polluted” (Phillips and Milner, 2021) with mis- and disinformation to examine how they become entangled with such problematic narratives. Such an exploration investigates the audience’s relationship with social media. This kind of approach helps us understand the role of disinformation in the lives of social media users. In this way, we learn the places and manners in which audiences become exposed to disinformation, what forms they take, and whether users accept, replicate, or reject these false narratives. Thus, the central research question for this project will be:

What role does disinformation have for audiences who are enmeshed in networks polluted with problematic information?