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Conspiracies beyond Fake News. Produsing Reinformation on Presidential Elections in the Transnational Hybrid Media System
Author(s) -
Pyrhönen Niko,
Bauvois Gwenaëlle
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
sociological inquiry
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.446
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1475-682X
pISSN - 0038-0245
DOI - 10.1111/soin.12339
Subject(s) - mainstream , presidential system , elite , grassroots , news media , social media , politics , fake news , media studies , presidential election , sociology , journalism , political science , law
As presidential elections carry the promise of distilling the contested and elusive “will of the people,” the protracted media event intensifies the public demand for exposing the transgressions of the aspiring political elite. This expectation provides fertile ground for investigative journalism, ultrapartisan smear campaigns, fake news, and full‐fledged conspiracy theories that are sometimes difficult to differentiate from one another in a hybridized media space. We compare three unique conspiracy stories— Macronleaks, Pizzagate, and Voter fraud —emerging during the previous French and American elections. We assess the divergent strategies of social action that contribute to the stories’ dissimilar patterns for intervening the political news cycle with the “reinformative toolkit” and deconstruct the common conspiratorial “masterplot” for “reinforming” the public. Focusing on online “produsers”—media users functioning as (dis)information producers—we analyze how the grassroots level participated in shaping the conspiracy stories’ synopses and channeling news‐framed, conspiratory content between mainstream and “countermedia” outlets.