The Routledge Companion to Media Disinformation and Populism 9780367435769, 9780367704919, 9781003004431

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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO MEDIA DISINFORMATION AND POPULISM

This Companion brings together a diverse set of concepts used to analyse dimensions of media disinformation and populism globally. The Routledge Companion to Media Disinformation and Populism explores how recent transformations in the architecture of public communication and particular attributes of the digital media ecology are conducive to the kind of polarised, anti-rational, post-fact, post-truth communication championed by populism. It is both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, consisting of contributions from leading and emerging scholars analysing aspects of misinformation, disinformation, and populism across countries, political systems, and media systems. A  global, comparative approach to the study of misinformation and populism is important in identifying common elements and characteristics, and these individual chapters cover a wide range of topics and themes, including fake news, mediatisation, propaganda, alternative media, immigration, science, and law-making, to name a few. This Companion is a key resource for academics, researchers, and policymakers as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students in the fields of political communication, journalism, law, sociology, cultural studies, international politics, and international relations. Howard Tumber is Professor in the Department of Journalism at City, University of London, UK. He is a founder and editor of Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism. He has published widely on the sociology of media and journalism. Silvio Waisbord is Director of and Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, USA. He was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Communication, and he has published widely about news, politics, and social change.

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO MEDIA DISINFORMATION AND POPULISM

Edited by Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-43576-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-70491-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-00443-1 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of figures List of tables List of contributors

xi xii xiii

Introduction Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord

1

  1 Media, disinformation, and populism: problems and responses Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord PART I

13

Key concepts

27

  2 What do we mean by populism? Carlos de la Torre

29

  3 Misinformation and disinformation Rachel Armitage and Cristian Vaccari

38

  4 Rethinking mediatisation: populism and the mediatisation of politics Daniel C. Hallin   5 Media systems and misinformation Jonathan Hardy

49 59

v

Contents

  6 Rewired propaganda: propaganda, misinformation, and populism in the digital age Sarah Oates

71

  7 Hate propaganda Cherian George

80

  8 Filter bubbles and digital echo chambers Judith Möller

92

  9 Disputes over or against reality? Fine-graining the textures of post-truth politics Susana Salgado 10 Fake news Edson C. Tandoc Jr.

101 110

PART II

Media misinformation and disinformation

119

11 The evolution of computational propaganda: theories, debates, and innovation of the Russian model Dariya Tsyrenzhapova and Samuel C. Woolley

121

12 Polarisation and misinformation Johanna Dunaway

131

13 Data journalism and misinformation Oscar Westlund and Alfred Hermida

142

14 Media and the ‘alt-right’ George Hawley

151

15 ‘Listen to your gut’: how Fox News’s populist style changed the American public sphere and journalistic truth in the process Reece Peck 16 Alternative online political media: challenging or exacerbating populism and mis/disinformation? Declan McDowell-Naylor, Richard Thomas, and Stephen Cushion

vi

160

169

Contents

17 Online harassment of journalists as a consequence of populism, mis/disinformation, and impunity Jeannine E. Relly

178

18 Lessons from an extraordinary year: four heuristics for studying mediated misinformation in 2020 and beyond Lucas Graves

188

19 Right-wing populism, visual disinformation, and Brexit: from the UKIP ‘Breaking Point’ poster to the aftermath of the London Westminster bridge attack Simon Faulkner, Hannah Guy, and Farida Vis PART III

198

The politics of misinformation and disinformation

209

20 Misogyny and the politics of misinformation Sarah Banet-Weiser

211

21 Anti-immigration disinformation Eileen Culloty and Jane Suiter

221

22 Science and the politics of misinformation Jeremy Levy, Robin Bayes, Toby Bolsen, and James N. Druckman

231

23 Government disinformation in war and conflict Rhys Crilley and Precious N. Chatterje-Doody

242

24 Military disinformation: a bodyguard of lies Kevin Foster

253

25 Extreme right and mis/disinformation Thomas Frissen, Leen d’Haenens, and Michaël Opgenhaffen

268

26 Information disorder practices in/by contemporary Russia Svetlana S. Bodrunova

279

27 Protest, activism, and false information Jennifer Earl, Rina James, Elliot Ramo, and Sam Scovill

290

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Contents

28 Conspiracy theories: misinformed publics or wittingly believing false information? Jaron Harambam

302

29 Corrupted infrastructures of meaning: post-truth identities online Catherine R. Baker and Andrew Chadwick

312

30 Consumption of misinformation and disinformation Sophie Lecheler and Jana Laura Egelhofer PART IV

323

Media and populism

333

31 Populism in Africa: personalistic leaders and the illusion of representation Bruce Mutsvairo and Susana Salgado

335

32 Populism and misinformation from the American Revolution to the twenty-first-century United States Chris Wells and Alex Rochefort

345

33 Populism, media, and misinformation in Latin America Ignacio Siles, Larissa Tristán, and Carolina Carazo 34 Perceived mis- and disinformation in a post-factual information setting: a conceptualisation and evidence from ten European countries Michael Hameleers and Claes de Vreese 35 The role of social media in the rise of right-wing populism in Finland Karina Horsti and Tuija Saresma 36 Social media manipulation in Turkey: actors, tactics, targets Bilge Yesil

356

366

376 386

37 Populist rhetoric and media misinformation in the 2016 UK Brexit referendum Glenda Cooper

397

38 Media policy failures and the emergence of right-wing populism Des Freedman

411

viii

Contents

39 Disentangling polarisation and civic empowerment in the digital age: the role of filter bubbles and echo chambers in the rise of populism William H. Dutton and Craig T. Robertson PART V

420

Responses to misinformation, disinformation, and populism

435

40 Legal and regulatory responses to misinformation and populism Alison Harcourt

437

41 Global responses to misinformation and populism Daniel Funke

449

42 Singapore’s fake news law: countering populists’ falsehoods and truth-making Shawn Goh and Carol Soon

459

43 Debunking misinformation Eun-Ju Lee and Soo Yun Shin

470

44 News literacy and misinformation Melissa Tully

480

45 Media and information literacies as a response to misinformation and populism489 Nicole A. Cooke 46 People-powered correction: fixing misinformation on social media Leticia Bode and Emily K. Vraga

498

47 Countering hate speech Babak Bahador

507

48 Constructing digital counter-narratives as a response to disinformation and populism Eva Giraud and Elizabeth Poole 49 Journalistic responses to misinformation Maria Kyriakidou and Stephen Cushion 50 Responses to mis/disinformation: practitioner experiences and approaches in low income settings James Deane ix

519 529

538

Contents

51 The effect of corrections and corrected misinformation Emily Thorson and Jianing Li 52 Building connective democracy: interdisciplinary solutions to the problem of polarisation Christian Staal Bruun Overgaard, Anthony Dudo, Matthew Lease, Gina M. Masullo, Natalie Jomini Stroud, Scott R. Stroud, and Samuel C. Woolley

548

559

Index569

x

FIGURES

10.1 Elements of ‘fake news’ 19.1 UK Independence Party Leader (UKIP) Nigel Farage addresses the media during a national poster launch campaign ahead of the EU referendum in London on 16 June 2016 19.2 Sequence frame showing a woman visibly distressed passing the scene of the terrorist incident on Westminster Bridge, London, 22 March 2017 34.1 A depiction of the mean scores of mis- and disinformation perceptions in the ten countries under study 39.1 Average number of online political news sources consulted often or very often 39.2 Average frequency of ‘reading something you disagree with’ when looking for news or political information 40.1 The frequency of ‘fake news’ in Google Trends (2004–2018) 41.1 Countries that have taken action against online mis- and disinformation

xi

112

199 200 371 429 430 438 452

TABLES

39.1 Populism scale items and percentage of respondents in each country who agreed or strongly agreed 39.2 Multiple regressions predicting populist attitudes 39.3 Multiple regressions predicting level of agreement with the political opinions or content posted by friends on social media 39.4 Logistic regressions predicting communication primarily with politically similar others online 39.5 Multiple regressions predicting number of online political news sources consulted often or very often 39.6 Multiple regressions predicting frequency of ‘reading something you disagree with’ when looking for news or political information 44.1 Defining news literacy: 5 Cs

xii

424 426 427 427 428 430 482

CONTRIBUTORS

Rachel Armitage is a PhD candidate in the Online Civic Culture Centre at Loughborough University. Her research aims to identify the political and social psychological roots of misinformation and disinformation and to explore how different interventions on social media might reduce individuals’ propensity to share such content. Rachel holds a BA in political science from the University of Birmingham and is a 2016 Nottingham Roosevelt Memorial Travelling Scholar. She has worked in both community engagement and local government, with a specific focus on promoting democratic participation. Babak Bahador  is Associate Research Professor at the School of Media and Public Affairs (SMPA) at George Washington University and a senior fellow at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. He holds a PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics. His research focuses on the overlap of media and politics/international relations, with primary focus on peacebuilding. At GW, Babak directs the Media and Peacebuilding Project, which aims to bridge the gap between academic research and peacebuilding practice. He is also a faculty member at GW’s Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics. Catherine R. Baker is a PhD researcher in the Online Civic Culture Centre (O3C) at Loughborough University. Her research focuses on infrastructures of meaning, identity, and rhetoric within the online misogynist incel movement. Catherine holds a first-class honours degree in psychology from Trinity College Dublin, where she also worked as a research assistant in the Trinity Institute of Neuroscience. Sarah Banet-Weiser is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. She is the author of  The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (1999), Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (2007), Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture  (2012), and  Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny  (2018). She is the co-editor of  Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting (2007),  Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times  (2012), and  Racism PostRace (2019) and has published in journals such as Social Media and Society, International Journal of Communication, American Quarterly, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Feminist Theory, and Cultural Studies.

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Contributors

Robin Bayes is a PhD candidate in political science at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on the political communication and political psychology of science-related policy issues, particularly the environment, sustainability, and climate change. In recent projects, she has investigated the motivational dynamics behind partisan-motivated reasoning, the need for publicly available data sources regarding science literacy and attitudes in the American public, and the future of climate change consensus messaging research. Leticia Bode is a provost’s distinguished Associate Professor in the Communication, Culture, and Technology master’s programme at Georgetown University. She researches the intersection of communication, technology, and political behaviour, emphasising the role communication and information technologies may play in the acquisition, use, effects, and implications of political information. Svetlana S. Bodrunova is habilitated Doctor of Political Science and Professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, St. Petersburg State University, Russia. She has led five research projects and published two books, several chapters, and over 80 research papers in Russian and English on Russian and European journalism, media and politics, social media, and automated methods of media research. She leads the Center for International Media Research in her university. Her works have appeared in Journalism, International Journal of Communication, Media and Communication, and Journalism Practice. She is a co-creator and host of CMSTW, an annual conference on comparative media studies. Toby Bolsen is Associate Professor of Political Science and Faculty Affiliate at the Urban Studies Institute, Georgia State University. He studies public opinion, political behaviour, science and political communication, and experimental methods. Carolina Carazo is Professor of Media and Political Communication in the School of Communication at the University of Costa Rica. She obtained her PhD in sociology from Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (Spain) and holds a master’s degree in political communication (Emerson College, Boston, MA). She is a researcher at the Communication Research Center at University of Costa Rica and has published articles on media, journalism, and political communication. Andrew Chadwick is Professor of Political Communication in the Department of Communication and Media at Loughborough University, where he is also director of the Online Civic Culture Centre (O3C). Precious N. Chatterje-Doody is Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at Open University, UK. Her multidisciplinary research interests centre on questions of communication, soft power, identity, and security, particularly in relation to Russia. She has published articles in Politics, Critical Studies on Security, and Media and Communication, and her monographs, ‘The Russian Identity riddle: Unwrapping Russia’s Security Policy’ and ‘Russia Today and Conspiracy Theory’ (with Dr. Ilya Yablokov, Leeds University) are due to be published by Routledge in 2021. Nicole Cooke is the Augusta Baker Endowed Chair and Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina. Her research and teaching interests include human information behaviour, critical cultural information studies, and diversity and social justice in librarianship. She was the 2019 ALISE Excellence in Teaching Award recipient, and she has edited and authored several books, including Information Services to Diverse Populations and Fake News and Alternative Facts: Information Literacy in a Post-truth Era.

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Contributors

Glenda Cooper (PhD) is Senior Lecturer in journalism at City, University of London. She is the author of Reporting Humanitarian Disasters in a Social Media Age (Routledge, 2018) and co-editor of  Humanitarianism, Communications and Change  (Peter Lang, 2015). Prior to City, she was the 14th Guardian Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, and has worked as a staff reporter and editor at The Independent, the Sunday Times, the Washington Post, the Daily Telegraph, and BBC Radio 4. Rhys Crilley is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. His current research explores the politics of nuclear weapons through an attention to narratives and emotions in policies of deterrence and strategies for disarmament. Rhys has published on the intersections of popular culture, social media, and war in several journal articles, and he is currently working on writing his first monograph. Eileen Culloty is Post-doctoral Researcher at the Dublin City University Institute for Future Media and Journalism, where she leads research on countering disinformation as part of the H2020 project Provenance (grant no. 825227). Stephen Cushion is Professor at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture. He has written three sole-authored books, News and Politics: The Rise of Live and Interpretive Journalism (2015, Routledge), The Democratic Value of News: Why Public Service Media Matter (2012, Palgrave), and Television Journalism (2012, Sage), and one co-authored book, Reporting Elections: Rethinking the Logic of Campaign Coverage (2018, Polity Press, and co-edited The Future of 24-Hour News (2016, Peter Lang) and The Rise of 24-Hour News (2010, Peter Lang). He has published over 70 journal articles, book chapters, and reports on issues related to news, politics, and journalism. James Deane is Director of Policy and Research at BBC Media Action, the BBC’s international media support charity. He is also the principal author of a feasibility study to create a new international fund for public interest media. James is a founding member and former executive director of the Panos Institute, founded in 1986 to inform and improve developing country–driven public debate on environment and development issues. He is also chair of the Board of Global Voices, a citizens’ journalism network. He is the author and commissioner of multiple briefings and publications on the role of media in international development. Carlos de la Torre is Professor and Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. He has been a fellow at the Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars. He is the editor of The Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (2019); The Promise and Perils of Populism (2015); and Latin American Populism of the Twenty-First Century, co-edited with Cynthia Arnson (2013). He is the author of  Populisms: A Quick Immersion and Populist Seduction in Latin America.​ Claes de Vreese is Professor and Chair of Political Communication in the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam (UvA). He is the founding director of the Center for Politics and Communication. His research interests include technology and democracy; comparative journalism research; the effects of news, public opinion, and European integration; and the effects of information and campaigning on elections, referendums, and direct democracy.

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Contributors

Leen d’Haenens is Professor in Communication Science at the Institute for Media Studies of the Faculty of Social Sciences in KU Leuven, where she teaches Analysis of Media Texts and European Media Policy at the BA level and Media, Audiences and Identity at the MA level. Her research interests touch upon the topic of young people and (social) media use, with a focus on vulnerable youth. She combines quantitative and qualitative methods; multi-site ­comparisons; and, in recent years, ‘small data’ with ‘big data’ methods. She is co-editor of Communications: the European Journal of Communication Research and associate editor of The International Communication Gazette. She is a member of the Euromedia Research Group. James N. Druckman is the Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University. He studies public opinion, science and political communication, and experimental methods. Anthony Dudo (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is Associate Professor at the Stan Richards School of Advertising and Public Relations at the University of Texas at Austin and the programme director for science communication in the Center for Media Engagement. Anthony researches the intersection of science, media, and society. He is particularly interested in scientists’ public engagement activities, media representations of science and environmental issues, and the contributions of informational and entertainment media to public perceptions of science. His recent work has examined factors influencing scientists’ likelihood to engage in public communication, scientists’ goals for public engagement, and the growing community of science communication trainers. Johanna Dunaway is Associate Professor at Texas A&M University. Her research focuses on political communication and media effects on political learning, attitudes, and behavior. Her current research examines the political impact of the changing contemporary media environment. Her work appears in journals such as The American Journal of Political Science; Information, Communication & Society; The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication; The Journal of Communication; The Journal of Politics; Journalism Studies; PLoS One; Political Communication; Political Research Quarterly; Political Behavior; Public Opinion Quarterly; and Social Science Quarterly. She also co-authored the 9th and 10th editions of Mass Media and American Politics. William H. Dutton is Emeritus Professor at the University of Southern California; an Oxford Martin Fellow, supporting the Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre at the University of Oxford’s Department of Computer Science; a senior fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII); and a visiting professor in media and communication at the University of Leeds. Until 2018, Bill was the James H. Quello Professor of Media and Information Policy at Michigan State University, where he was the director of the Quello Center. Prior to that, he was the OII’s founding director and the first professor of internet studies at Oxford University. Jennifer Earl is Professor of Sociology and Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on social movements, information technologies, and the sociology of law, with research emphases on internet activism, social movement repression, youth activism, and legal change. She is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for research from 2006 to 2011 on web activism, was a member of the MacArthur Research Network on Youth and Participatory Politics, and co-authored (with Katrina Kimport) Digitally Enabled Social Change. Jana Laura Egelhofer is a PhD candidate at the Department of Communication, University of Vienna. Her research interests include fake news and disinformation, media criticism, political

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Contributors

journalism, and media perceptions. Her work has been published in international journals such as Annals of the International Communication Association and Journalism Studies. Simon Faulkner is Senior Lecturer in art history and visual culture at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research is concerned with the political uses and meanings of images, with a particular emphasis on conflict, activism, and protest. Since 2007, this research has been particularly concerned with relationships between visual practices and the Israeli occupation. He is also the co-director of the Visual Social Media Lab and has a strong interest in the development of methods relevant to the analysis of images circulated on social media. Kevin Foster is the head of the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne. He is the author of Fighting Fictions: War, Narrative and National Identity (1999), Lost Worlds: Latin America and the Imagining of Empire (2009), and Don’t Mention the War: The Australian Defence Force, the Media and the Afghan Conflict (2013). He edited What Are We Doing in Afghanistan? The Military and the Media at War (2009) and The Information Battlefield: Representing Australians at War (2011). His new book, Anti-Social Media: Conventional Militaries in the Digital Battlespace, will be published in 2021. Des Freedman is Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, and co-director of the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre. He is the author of The Contradictions of Media Power (Bloomsbury, 2014) and The Politics of Media Policy (Polity, 2008)  and co-author (with James Curran and Natalie Fenton) of  Misunderstanding the Internet  (Routledge, 2016). He has edited a number of volumes on broadcasting, media reform, liberalism, terrorism, and the politics of higher education and is one of the founder members and former chair of the UK Media Reform Coalition. Thomas Frissen is Assistant Professor in Digital Technology and Society at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University. His research centres around questions concerning the influences of digital media and technologies in radicalisation, extremism, and terrorism. Specifically, his research aims to advance a better understanding of various ‘dark’ online cultures, ranging from Salafi-jihadism, and right-wing extremism, to communities of non-suicidal self-injurious behavior. His current research concentrates on the spread dynamics of (extreme) conspiracy theories, fake news, and memes in the online information ecosystem. Thomas uses a research toolbox that consists of both classical and digital social scientific research methods. Daniel Funke is a staff writer covering online mis- and disinformation for PolitiFact, a Pulitzer Prize–winning fact-checking website based at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. He has been writing about fact-checking, technology, misinformation, and politics since 2017, when he joined the International Fact-Checking Network as a reporter. Funke is a former recipient of the Google News Lab Fellowship and has worked for several news outlets in the United States, including the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Atlanta JournalConstitution. He is a graduate of the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. Cherian George is Professor of media studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. He researches media freedom, censorship, and hate propaganda. His 2016 monograph, Hate Spin: The Manufacture of Religious Offense and its Threat to Democracy (MIT Press), was named one of the 100 best books of the year by Publishers Weekly. His other recent books include Media and Power in Southeast Asia (with Gayathry Venkiteswaran; Cambridge University Press, 2019).

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His graphic book on cartoon censorship, Red Lines: Political Cartoons and the Struggle against Censorship (with Sonny Liew), will be published by MIT Press in 2021. Eva Haifa Giraud is Senior Lecturer in Media at Keele University, her research focuses on frictions and affinities between non-anthropocentric theories and activist practice. Her monograph on these themes, What Comes After Entanglement? Activism, Anthropocentrism and an Ethics of Exclusion (Duke University Press), was published in 2019 and she has also published articles in journals including Theory, Culture  & Society,  Social Studies of Science,  New Media  & Society, and The Sociological Review. She is currently reviews editor for Cultural Politics. Shawn Goh is a research assistant at the Institute of Policy Studies at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. His research focuses on the social and policy implications of digital media and the internet: specifically in the areas of misinformation and disinformation, internet governance, digital inclusion, and government communications. In 2018, he was invited by the Singapore Parliamentary Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods as an expert witness to present his research on tackling online falsehoods. His recent publications on the topic include a conference paper presented at the 69th annual International Communication Association Conference and a peer-reviewed journal article on governing the information ecosystem in Southeast Asia that was published in Public Integrity in 2019. Lucas Graves is Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has been at the forefront of research on the global fact-checking movement and is the author of Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political FactChecking in American Journalism (Columbia University Press, 2016). His work has appeared in the  New  York Times, The  Columbia Journalism Review,  The Nieman Journalism Lab, and many scholarly journals. From 2017 to 2019, he was Senior Research Fellow and acting Research Director at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University. Hannah  Guy  is a PhD student at Manchester Metropolitan University, examining the role of images in the spread of disinformation on social media. This project is funded through an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Collaborative Doctoral Award and is in partnership with First Draft. She is also a member of the Visual Social Media Lab, where her current projects explore images shared on Twitter during the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement and digital literacy in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Daniel C. Hallin is Distinguished Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego, and is a fellow of the International Communication Association. His books include The “Uncensored War”: The Media and Vietnam; “We Keep America on Top of the World”: Television News and the Public Sphere; Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics; and Making Health Public: How News Coverage Is Remaking Media, Medicine and Contemporary Life. He is currently doing research on media systems in Latin America. Michael Hameleers (PhD, University of Amsterdam, 2017) is Assistant Professor in Political Communication at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His research interests include corrective information, disinformation, populism, framing, (affective) polarisation, and the role of social identity in media effects. Jaron Harambam is an interdisciplinary sociologist working on conspiracy theories, (social) media, and AI (content moderation, search/recommender systems). He is Marie ­Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship holder at the Institute for Media Studies (KU L ­ euven, xviii

Contributors

Belgium) and held a post-doctoral research position at the Institute for Information Law (University of Amsterdam). His monograph “Contemporary Conspiracy Culture: Truth and Knowledge in an Era of Epistemic Instability” is out at Routledge and won the Best Dissertation 2017–19 Award of the Dutch Sociology Association (NSV). He is editor-in-chief of the openaccess Dutch peer-reviewed journal www.TijdschriftSociologie.eu and a member of the European network of scholars working on conspiracy theories, COST COMPACT. Alison Harcourt is Professor of Public Policy at the Department of Politics at the University of Exeter. She is also Director of the Centre for European Governance. Alison specialises in regulatory change in digital markets and is interested in solutions to regulatory problems based around the citizen/consumer and/or civil society voice. She has written on the regulation of traditional and new media markets and internet governance at EU and international levels contributing to the literature on agenda-setting, regulatory competition, soft governance, Europeanisation, and policy convergence. Jonathan Hardy is Professor of Communications and Media at the University of the Arts, London, and teaches media political economy at Goldsmiths College, London. He writes and comments on media industries, media and advertising, communications regulation, and international media systems. His books include Critical Political Economy of the Media (2014), CrossMedia Promotion (2010), and Western Media Systems (2008). He is co-editor of The Advertising Handbook (2018) and series editor of Routledge Critical Advertising Studies. He is a member of the editorial boards of Digital Journalism (Taylor and Francis), Political Economy of Communication, and Triple C: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. George Hawley is Associate Professor of political science at the University of Alabama. His research interests include electoral behaviour, politics and religion, conservatism in the US, and right-wing radicalism. He is the author of six books, including Making Sense of the Alt-Right and Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism. Alfred Hermida (PhD) is Professor at the School of Journalism, Writing, and Media at the University of British Columbia and co-founder of The Conversation Canada. With his more than two decades of experience in digital journalism, his research addresses the transformation of media, emergent news practices, media innovation, social media, and data journalism. He is the author of Tell Everyone: Why We Share and Why It Matters (Doubleday, 2014), winner of the 2015 National Business Book Award, as well as co-author of Data Journalism and the Regeneration of News (Routledge, 2019) and Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers (Wiley Blackwell, 2011). Hermida was a BBC TV, radio, and online journalist for 16 years, including 4 in North Africa and the Middle East, before going on to be a founding news editor of the BBC News website in 1997. Karina Horsti (PhD) is a media and migration scholar whose work focuses on refugees, migration, memory, racism, and nationalist populist movements. She is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Policy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She works across disciplines and collaborates with artists, activists, and refugees. She has directed multiple research projects, including Post-Truth Public Stories in the Transnational Hybrid Media Space (2017–2018) and two Nordic research networks – Borderscapes, Memory and Migration (2016–2017) and Nordic Research Network for Media, Migration and Society (2007–2010). She is the editor of The Politics of Public Memories of Forced Migration and Bordering in Europe (2019). Rina James is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Arizona, specialising in technology, culture, and inequality. They are currently engaged in two strands of research. xix

Contributors

The first is concerned with economic impacts of disparities in digital skills; the second focuses on the production and spread of gender-essentialist, anti-feminist ideology on social media. Maria Kyriakidou is Senior Lecturer in the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University. Her research addresses the relationship between media and globalisation, with a particular focus on the mediation of distant suffering and global crises. She has published work on audience engagement with distant disasters, the media coverage of the Euro crisis, and global media events. Matthew Lease (PhD, Brown University) is Associate Professor and computer scientist in the School of Information and a faculty research associate for the Center for Media Engagement, University of Texas at Austin. His research spans crowdsourcing, information retrieval, and natural language processing. His lab received recent paper awards at the 2019 European Conference for Information Retrieval and the 2016 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Human Computation and Crowdsourcing conference. Lease is currently helping lead Good Systems, an eight-year, university-wide Grand Challenge Initiative at UT Austin to design AI technologies that maximally benefit society. Sophie Lecheler is Professor of Political Communication at the Department of Communication Science, University of Vienna. Her research focuses on political journalism, digitalisation of news, emotions, and experimental methods. She previously worked at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) and the LSE’s Department of Government. Her work has been published in a wide range of international journals, such as Political Communication, Political Psychology, Communication Research, Journal of Communication, and New Media  & Society. She is currently Associate Editor of the International Journal of Press/Politics and editorial board member of several high-ranking journals. Eun-Ju Lee (PhD Stanford University) is Professor in the Department of Communication at Seoul National University, Republic of Korea. Her research has focused on social cognition and social influence in computer-mediated communication and human-computer interaction. She co-edited Media Psychology and is the current editor-in-chief of Human Communication Research. She is an ICA Fellow. Jeremy Levy is a PhD candidate in Northwestern’s Department of Political Science. He studies public opinion, political communications and political psychology, belief systems, and public policy. His current project focuses on conceptual issues in defining misinformation and what this means for our understanding of misinformation prevalence, difficulty in correction, and normative implications. Before coming to Northwestern, he worked at the Urban Institute and received his Masters of Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley. Jianing Li is a PhD student and a Knight Scholar of Communications and Civic Renewal the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research centres on misinformation, misperception, and fact-checking in new communication ecologies. Using experimental, computational, and social neuroscience methods, her work examines citizens’ knowledge in contested political and public health issues, psychological and contextual mechanisms contributing to misperceptions, dissemination of and discourse around misinformation in digital media environments, and effective corrective messages that facilitate belief and attitude updating. Gina M. Masullo (PhD, Syracuse University) is the associate director of the Center for Media Engagement and Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the xx

Contributors

University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on how the digital space both connects and divides people and how that influences society, individuals, and journalism. She is coeditor of Scandal in a Digital Age and author of Online Incivility and Public Debate: Nasty Talk and The New Town Hall: Why We Engage Personally with Politicians, is forthcoming in 2020. Declan McDowell-Naylor is a research associate in the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University. His research focuses on digital politics, political communication, science and technology development, and democracy. Alongside Professor Stephen Cushion and Dr Richard Thomas, he is a researcher on the ESRC-funded project titled ‘Beyond the MSM: Understanding the Rise of Alternative Online Political Media’. He has been published in Journalism and contributed chapters to the edited editions of Political Communication in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and A Research Agenda for Digital Politics (Edward Elgar, 2020). Judith Möller is tenured Assistant Professor in political communication at the Department of Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam. In her research, she focuses on the effects of political communication: in particular, social media and digital media. Bruce Mutsvairo  is Professor of Journalism at Auburn University in the US. His research focuses on the development of journalism and democracy in the global South. He is the author/ editor or editor of eight books published by Palgrave Macmillan, Amsterdam University Press, and Rowman and Littlefield. His ninth book, Decolonizing Political Communication in Africa, is due in early 2021 from Routledge. He is a visiting research fellow at the University of Free State in South Africa. Sarah Oates is Professor and Senior Scholar at the Phillip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her work focuses on political communication and democratisation. Her most recent book, Revolution Stalled: The Political Limits of the Internet in the Post-Soviet Sphere (Oxford University Press), found a faint hope for online mobilisation in Russia. Her current work examines how political messages travel through media ecosystems, including a study of how Russian propaganda narratives gain traction in US media. Michaël Opgenhaffen is Associate Professor at the Institute for Media Studies (KU Leuven, Belgium). He is director of the master’s in journalism programme at the KU Leuven and visiting professor at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands. His research focuses on the production and consumption of social media news. In this context, he studies disinformation on social media platforms. He is co-founder of a fact-checking website in Belgium that uses artificial intelligence to detect fake news. Christian Staal Bruun Overgaard (MSc, University of Southern Denmark) is a Knight Research Associate at the Center for Media Engagement and a doctoral student at the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a BSc and an MSc in economics and business administration from the University of Southern Denmark. His research focuses on the psychological and behavioural effects of news media and the societal and political ramifications of these effects. Reece Peck is Associate Professor at the Department of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. He is the author of Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class (Cambridge, 2019). His research engages the media dimension of the American political right and specifically examines how conservative news outlets have used tabloid media styles and populist xxi

Contributors

political rhetoric to reconfigure the meaning of social class in the United States. He also provides commentary on television and politics for news outlets such as the Washington Post, The Columbia Journalism Review and New York Magazine. Elizabeth Poole is Professor of media at Keele University. Her work focuses on the production, representation, and reception of Muslims in the media, and she has written widely on this subject including Reporting Islam (I. B. Tauris, 2002), Muslims and the News Media (I. B. Tauris, 2006), and Media Portrayals of Religion and the Secular Sacred (Ashgate, 2013). She has recently been working in the area of digital activism and Islamophobic hate speech online (British Academy, AHRC). She is an executive member of MECCSA, the UK’s Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association. Elliot Ramo is a first-year PhD student at the University of Arizona School of Sociology. They received their Bachelor of Arts degree in 2012 from the University of Mary Washington. Their research agenda intersects law and society, technology, stratification, and power. Elliot is currently using a mixed-methods approach to investigate how online legal research tools (e.g. the Westlaw database) shape legal knowledge. Prior to graduate school, Elliot worked in the insurance and technology sectors as an analyst and project manager. Jeannine E. Relly is Professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Arizona. She holds a courtesy appointment with the School of Government and Public Policy and is affiliated with the university’s Center for Latin American Studies, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and Center for Digital Society and Data Studies. Her research focus includes global influences on news media systems. Other research focuses on factors influencing democratic institutions, such as public information access, online disinformation, and various forms of insecurity. She is a research fellow with Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Craig T. Robertson (PhD, Michigan State University) is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. Craig's research focuses on news audiences, with particular emphasis on audience attitudes and beliefs with respect to journalism, as well as their news consumption behaviors. Key interests are around news trust and credibility, individuals' epistemological beliefs with respect to journalism, audience verification practices, and how people interact with misinformation. Alex Rochefort is a doctoral student in the Division of Emerging Media Studies at Boston University’s College of Communication. His research agenda focuses on platform governance, communication policy, content moderation, and the political uses of misinformation. His 2020 article ‘Regulating Social Media Platforms: A Comparative Policy Analysis’ appeared in Communication Law  & Policy. He has also contributed to the 2019 and 2020 editions of Freedom on the Net, a report by Freedom House, where he was a 2019 Google Public Policy Fellow. Susana Salgado (PhD, 2007) is Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Portugal. Her most recent publications include the book Mediated Campaigns and Populism in Europe (editor; Palgrave, 2019,) and the articles ‘Never Say Never . . . Or the Value of Context in Political Communication Research’ (Political Communication, 2019), ‘Interpretive Journalism’ (Oxford Bibliographies in Communication, 2019), and ‘Online Media Impact on Politics: Views on Post-truth Politics and Post-postmodernism’, (International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, 2018). Susana is PI of the research project Hate: Streams xxii

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of Hate and Untruth, funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (PTDC/ CPO-CPO/28495/2017). Tuija Saresma (PhD) is a senior researcher in the Research Centre for Contemporary Culture at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Saresma is a co-director of the research consortium Crossing Borders and is currently working on two projects: Mainstreaming Populism and Crises Redefined. She has published academic and popul