Recursion theory and the ‘death tax’

Abstract

Since the 2016 US federal election, political actors have weaponized online fake news as a means of gaining electoral advantage (Egelhofer and Lecheler 2019). To advance understandings of the actors and methods involved in perpetuating fake news, this article focuses on an Australian story that circulated on and offline through different discourses during the 2019 federal election. We use content analyses of 100,000 media articles and eight million Facebook posts to trace false claims that the centre-left Labor party would introduce an inheritance tax dubbed a ‘death tax’ if it won office. To understand this evolution of ‘death tax’ discourse on and offline – and its weaponization by various actors – we draw from existing theorems of agenda setting, backfire effects, and propose our own recursion theory.

Mapping automatic social media information disorder. The role of bots and AI in spreading misleading information in society

“…It is essential to identify the different actors behind the dissemination of false or harmful information, their motivations, and the methods they use [24,25]. The various social media platforms have unique characteristics that make them more susceptible to misinformation, disinformation and malinformation and this should be taken into account when designing interventions to mitigate their spread.…”

This Is Not Real News: Discursive Struggles over Fake News, Journalism, and Democracy

“…While further research is still needed, it is important to highlight that emergent scholarship is exploring these pertinent topics in such far-flung locales as Germany , Austria (Egelhofer et al, 2022), South Africa (Wasserman, 2020), Kenya (Tully, 2022), Australia (Carson et al, 2021), Malaysia , Cambodia , Taiwan , and the US . This line of work shows that fake news is often mobilised with opposing meaning ascriptions as part of political struggles, in addition to being a "negatively charged buzzword" (Egelhofer & Lecheler, 2019, p. 105).…”