Abstract
Truth deserts: Digital disinformation and market-based everything
The pluralistic idea of ‘news’, as privileged, values-based, independent, critical and above all participative, is a dominant tenet of an open democracy and normatively understood to have enabled a relatively fair and just society to be achieved, for some. Two recent books by Gareth Thompson (2020) and Jim Macnamara (2020) draw our attention to the increasingly ubiquitous phenomenon of ‘digital disinformation’ as a critically important but undertheorised communicative dynamic intersecting within media contexts of the 21st century. A great morass of harmful invented content sometimes labelled ‘fake news’, ‘alternative facts’ or ‘conspiracy theory’ now circulates on user-generated social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, amongst others, and its contagious effects are widespread and growing.
But rather than unmoored, both authors argue that the rise of digital disinformation is strategically propagated in ways that can be linked to the language, logic and practices of public relations by a great many individuals, groups, coalitions of groups with various opaque or hidden political, ideological or commercial agendas. Given impetus by the new affordances the digital technology offers, such as algorithm tracking, trolls and bots and the harvesting of big data, the extent of this entwinement is illustrated in 2019, when a ‘deepfake’ video of US Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi was posted on Facebook slurring her words as if badly intoxicated. Later, another version of the video was broadcast on Fox Business network and promoted by then US President Donald Trump. Macnamara (p. 159) uses this example to remind us that if we care about the type of society we are creating, it is the legitimisation of disinformation by large and ubiquitous and powerful corporations such as Facebook, politically biased global media corporations such as Fox News and weighty authority figures such former US president, that are the problem and not simply fringe elements like conspiracy theorists. Thompson underscores this point and argues that for ‘some of the new political entrepreneurs such as Donald Trump, fake news is not a sideshow but a core tool of political PR’ (p. 100). He says Trump used the term ‘fake news’ tactically ‘as a rhetorical device to discredit critical press coverage’ and as reputation management to undermine critical media outlets. Therefore behind the sometimes chaotic and divisive public spectacle, there may be cold hard coummunication strategy at play.
Students and academics interested in social media research and the wider media and communication cultural effects and practices will find both books provide a great many entry points to engage with the appalling gamut of digital disinformation practices in contemporary life. Informed by a rich array of contemporary social and political contexts, and interviews with workers in the public relations field, Thompson and Macnamara provide valuable insight into the marketization of disinformation, its digital proliferation and ensuing impacts on culture, politics and society; and in doing so shed light on how we might think critically about this emergent reality and its implications.
Disinformation is not new. Now declassified documents show that in 1954 that US civilian foreign intelligence service the CIA, interfered in the presidential elections in the Central American country of Guatemala. According to Ferreira (2008: 59–81) ‘the CIA documentation alerts us to how much the agency continued to dedicate itself covertly to destroying the public image of the president after he was toppled’. Historically much disinformation has been associated with state-based propaganda and media ownership that worked to filter information and control the masses, although in latter years this has taken place with media consent (Young, 2005). More recently and in relation to the Brexit referendum, Thompson (2020) refers to UK Prime Minister Teresa May and her public statements discussing the weaponisation of news by Russia’s state PR efforts in ‘planting fake stories’ to ‘sow discord in the West’ (p. 38). Thompson cites a 2019 European Commission and European Union foreign policy report that found that Russian propaganda activity had moved from large-scale co-ordinated disinformation work on digital platforms ‘to smaller-scale, localised operations that are harder to detect and expose’ (p. 39). Hence disinformation can be understood as morphing yet again into the careful strategizing and deployment of these tactics to undermine public debate by creating confusion, division and discord in order to reach a goal, such as suppressing voter turnout or influencing an election, with a level of user and participant consent, not seen before. Macnamara’s argument is that lack of trust in legitimate organisations, such as government, business and third sector organisations, is the ‘evolution of post-communication’ which has seen the ‘normalization of fake news and post-truth politics’ (p. 8). This is not an aberration but ‘an evolution in which the principles, properties, and characteristics that are traditionally identified with communication are superseded and replaced by antithetical features’ (p. 9).
In unpacking the changing relationship between truth, politics and people, Thompson says that anti-vaxxer groups are an example of an action-based coalition that ‘who have positioned themselves as victimised tellers of truth, struggling heroically against an alleged conspiracy of governments, the medical profession and big pharmaceutical campaigns (or big pharma)’ (p. 93). In pursuit of this, strategic communications tactics are deployed. Indeed Thompson points out that, ‘[T]he campaign has used the full mix of PR tools, including a documentary film – the 2016 Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe – as well as multiple conferences, rallies and celebrity endorsement from the model Elle Macpherson and Donald Trump’ (p. 93). In understanding the communications of groups like anti-vaxxers Macnamara usefully disentangles the term ‘misinformation’ from ‘disinformation’, noting that the former can be understood as accidental or inaccurate, such as misreporting, while the latter is defined by an intent to deceive from the outset.
A triangulation of corporate profit-making, meaning-making and communicative ethics in late modern society has been the subject of much academic research. However, today it is the blurring boundaries between propaganda and public relations in our digital world, and the means by which it can proliferate which is singular. To this end both books attempt to develop a new nomenclature and theoretical framework to capture these changes. For Thompson it is the demise of orthodox corporatist ‘classical PR’ and the rise of ‘post-classical PR’ given impetus by the ‘post truth’ conditions in contemporary society such as digital disinformation and populism. However, conjoining an idealised word like ‘classical’ to twentieth century ‘PR’ elides the unwanted political and cultural side-effects of its industrial scale activities, as well as its chequered ethical track record. So while Thompson has a robust critical discussion exploring this unity, the notion of ‘classical PR’ remains problematic for this reader, because the term projects a sanitised framework for understanding public relations history and its relationship to society. Nonetheless there is value in Thompson’s discussion and his description of the different genres of public relations and communication practice and their varying repertoires of styles according to context.
For Macnamara the attempt to change the nomenclature is replacing the term ‘public relations’ with ‘public communication’ as a type of catch-all straddling ‘all communication that occurs in the public sphere between organizations such as government departments and agencies, corporations, NGOs, and non-profit organizations on the one hand, and their stakeholders on the other’ (p. 4). While he notes that public communication ‘should be truthful and transparent (e.g., disclose its sources and interests) in order to be ethical’ (p. 45), the idea Macnamara invokes at the outset of the book does not centrally engage with questions of power, and he sometimes infuses his interpretative position with the language and ideas of public relations along the way. In this sense the notion of ‘public communication’ seems malleable and conflated with ‘public relations’ in ways that may hinder a clear analysis of problems, by creating distance between ‘PR’ and its failures and culpability. To illustrate this point Macnamara argues: ‘Action on climate change has been delayed and even rejected by many leaders and industry and business groups, despite overwhelming scientific evidence. Clearly, something is wrong in the public sphere of major democratic countries. Public communication is not working in an alarming number of cases and on a number of important issues’ (p. 5). Surprisingly, Thompson pays only passing attention to the matter of climate change communication. Arguably, the rising CO2 emissions and the impacts on nature and society is the most substantive debate that has been affected and shaped by ‘PR’ both in the past (Demetrious, 2019), and in the current cultural and communicative conditions of digital disinformation under discussion, with dire consequences for us all.
‘Digital disinformation’ and its associated impacts might have been regarded as somewhat niche academic foci several decades ago: but the phenomenon has metastasised and there is much work to be done in its unpicking. In tackling this topic, both authors are commended for a robust exposition of the problems and a novel focus in making sense of their implications. And both books are dense with examples and illustrations, although at times this was weighed down by an overabundance of description and context or grand theoretical ambition. In Macnamara’s case this was not assisted by lists of dot points in the important early sections of the book, and a somewhat cluttered writing style. Adding to this, his work tends to draw on an array of disciplinary traditions, rather than being interdisciplinary. For example, he says the analysis “is undertaken within the context of human communication theory and specifically within the framework of political, government, and corporate communication and related practices such as advertising and PR. It is also informed by media studies related to traditional and social media” (p.18). Thompson’s argument is positioned firmly in critical public relations and an engagement with communicative theory, and his writing is more integrated and flowing.
However style and disciplinary position issues to one side, it is hard to avoid ethical questions when discussing digital disinformation and its hybridisation with market-based communication like public relations. One cultural entanglement resulting from and contributing to the rise of digital disinformation and user-generated vitriol, is that in newsrooms there is more emphasis on a PR style management of audience-journalist relationship, and less on core practices like objective reporting (Kramp and Loosen, 2018). The increasing dominance of users is illustrated by Macnamara (2020) who tells us that ‘Facebook has become the most-used media platform in history with 2.5 billion active monthly users at the beginning of 2020’ (p. 143). The potential for problems abounds, but whether these conditions constitute a dramatic shift to ‘post-truth’ society as Thompson puts it, or ‘post-communication’ as Macnamara would have it, is moot. It could just be PR business, more or less, as usual.