Class, Community, and Context in the Diffusion of Disinformation in the Digital Era – ACTIVEINFO

What shapes how people respond to disinformation? Fake news, online deception, and computational propaganda are all terms to describe a phenomenon that has generated a broad array of studies, particularly over the past five years , yet one puzzle remains. Dramatically more people believe disinformation than those who report consuming it (Allen et al. 2020; Fletcher and Nielsen 2018; Grinberg et al. 2019; Tsfati et al. 2020). Understanding the mechanisms of this disconnect is the primary objective of my ACTIVEINFO research project. Most of this extant research has focused on top-down factors of disinformation diffusion in the digital era (3D), including Big Tech platform companies, the role of government regulation, and powerful political and financial actors. All of these approaches suggest that the audience for disinformation is passive, rather than active participants in the generation and recirculation of news and information, going against decades of communication research (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955). I will advance the 3D state of the art by avoiding the bias of selecting on the dependent variable of digitally visible disinformation and, instead, examine a broader array of bottom-up and everyday media practices. Furthermore, I will uncover not just what people are sharing, but what they are not sharing and why. In ACTIVEINFO I will address this selection bias in the literature with a two-country comparison (France and the United States) via qualitative-rich fieldwork and mixed methods, often absent from online data collection procedures.