Identity propaganda: Racial narratives and disinformation

Abstract

This article develops the concept of “identity propaganda,” or narratives that strategically target and exploit identity-based differences in accord with pre-existing power structures to maintain hegemonic social orders. In proposing and developing the concept of identity propaganda, we especially aim to help researchers find new insights into their data on misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda by outlining a framework for unpacking layers of historical power relations embedded in the content they analyze. We focus on three forms of identity propaganda: othering narratives that alienate and marginalize non-white or non-dominant groups; essentializing narratives that create generalizing tropes of marginalized groups; and authenticating narratives that call upon people to prove or undermine their claims to be part of certain groups. We demonstrate the utility of this framework through our analysis of identity propaganda around Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2020 US presidential election.

An Unrepresentative Democracy: How Disinformation and Online Abuse Hinder Women of Color Political Candidates in the United States

“…While researchers have identified and highlighted the problem of gendered disinformation, including the combination of mis-and disinformation and abuse (see for example Di Meco, 2019a;Jankowicz et al, 2021), we add to the limited research (Gray & Adeyemo, 2021;Guerin & Maharasingam-Shah, 2020;Reddi et al, 2021) that shows that this problem is not just gendered but intersectional. That is, even though women overall were more likely to be subject to mis-and disinformation than men, women of color were more likely to be targeted by mis-and disinformation, and, more importantly, combined forms of abuse and mis-and disinformation, than both white men and women.…”

“…Fortunately, some researchers have examined the ways identities, based on gender, race, etc., mediate the impacts of mis-and disinformation and abuse online (Gray & Adeyemo, 2021;Reddi et al, 2021;Ultraviolet, 2020). However, few have determined whether identities such as race and gender mean that some groups (e.g., women of color political candidates) are more likely to be impacted by mis-and disinformation and abuse than others.…”

Bots Amplify and Redirect Hate Speech in Online Discourse About Racism During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Resonating with recent scholarship on identity propaganda as a framework for online harms (Reddi et al, 2021), we sought to characterize hate speech in online discourse about racism through the use of identity terms, the use of which we counted with the NetMapper software (Altman et al, 2017; K. M. Carley, 2014; L.…”

“…Although such computational methods are not without their own limitations, they nonetheless introduce a systematic framework by which hate speech in online racism discussions can be identified (i.e., more or less likely to be hateful), as well as characterized (i.e., what identities are targeted). Orienting our approach to hate in this manner does not capture the complexity of online hate in its entirety (Pohjonen & Udupa, 2017); however, it may still meaningfully surface the social dimensions of hate beyond traditionally dichotomous classification schemes (Reddi et al, 2021) and thus provides a scalable, practical framework by which to specify how bots engage in hateful behavior in the context of online racism discourse and potentially introduce discursive shifts into the broader conversation (K. M. Carley, 2020; Uyheng et al, 2020).…”

Preprint - Sending News Back Home: Analyzing the Spread of Misinformation between Vietnam and Diasporic Communities in the 2020 Election

“…For example, in the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, Latinx communities were targeted with misinformation via Facebook and WhatsApp that focused on false claims that Democratic candidate Joe Biden was a "Fidel Castro-style" socialist [48]. Thus, researchers call for more empirical research into the spread, saliency and impact of misinformation shared in non-English native speaking and historically marginalized communities, and greater attention to the role of race, identity and power within the spread of mis/disinformation [106].…”