Johan Farkas

In this article, we examine how journalists try to uphold ideals of objectivity, clarity, and epistemic authority when using four overlapping terms: fake news, junk news, misinformation, and disinformation. Drawing on 16 qualitative interviews with journalists in Denmark, our study finds that journalists struggle to convert the ideals of clarity and objectivity into a coherent conceptual practice. Across interviews, journalists disagree on which concepts to use and how to define them, accusing academics of producing too technical definitions, politicians of diluting meaning, and journalistic peers of being insufficiently objective. Drawing on insights from journalism scholarship and rhetorical argumentation theory, we highlight how such disagreements reveal a fundamental tension in journalistic claims to epistemic authority, causing a continuous search for unambiguous terms, which in turn produces the very ambiguity that journalists seek to avoid.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, farright 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.

This research examines how activists mobilise against fake hate profiles on Facebook. Based on six months of participant observation, this paper demonstrates how Danish Facebook users organised to combat fictitious Muslim profiles that spurred hatred against ethnic minorities. Crowdsourced action by Facebook users is insufficient as a form of sustainable resistance against fake hate profiles. A viable solution would require social media companies, such as Facebook, to take responsibility in the struggle against fake content used for political manipulation.

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.

The rapid rise of "fake news" as a ubiquitous term in global politics has caused widespread debate in democratic societies concerning the distinction between true and false. A number of scholars and journalists have argued that we might be entering a post-truth or post-factual era. 1 In 2016, post-truth was even named word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries, defining the concept as "circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief." Based on this societal diagnosis, analysts have concluded that facts are moving to the background of contemporary politics. Politicians no longer concern themselves with the distinction between fake and real, making democracy shift from a rational to an emotional political system. 2 If we consider this characterization of the post-truth era, one aspect of contemporary politics appears paradoxical: rather than neglecting facts, it seems that democracy is increasingly saturated with disputes over what counts as "true," "real," "false," and "fake." Political actors routinely label their opponents as frauds, while claiming to be the bearers of truth themselves. As US President, Donald Trump, exemplifies, terms such as "fake news" have become a means of bolstering authority and attacking perceived enemies. It has become a way of obtaining and enforcing dominance in the political landscape. Facts are not simply dismissed. As part of a much more complex development, the very meaning or interpretation of the term "facts" seems to have become the epicenter of political struggles. If this is the case, we might consider whether the notions of the "post-truth" or "post-factual" era truly encapsulate the current state of democratic politics. This chapter argues that there is more to the story than what is often told: that facts are not becoming obsolete, but rather highly politicized. The term "fake news" has become a rhetorical weapon, increasingly mobilized by political actors to attack their opponents. As a consequence, the notion of "fake" shifts from a question of information validity to a question of political control: who gets to draw the line between "fake" and "real"?