Post-Truth Politics

Fake news, disinformation and manipulation of the media are widely perceived to constitute a fundamental challenge to modern liberal-representative democracies. In an era of post-truth politics, digital media has increasingly replaced traditional legacy media as the most important source and venue of political information and communication.

This is a fundamental shift since information online is often unverified by gatekeepers at news outlets. Information spreads without professional input from journalists. This proliferation of digital media therefore raises concerns about the quality of democratic discourse, since it can be used for manipulative purposes to spread false and unfiltered information, and potentially affect the electoral decisions of citizens in liberal democracies.

This is a particular challenge in terms of the possible impact of disinformation on public support for the European project as such. Especially since the lingering democratic deficit debate in the EU has identified lack of knowledge about the functioning of the European institutions as one of the key problems regarding the democratic legitimation of the EU. In other words, if there is a lack of knowledge to begin with, then the possible impact of disinformation is heightened.

In addition, the project will address the related topic of why disinformation appears to have such an appeal to nationalist and/or populist actors on the far right and examine whether similar strategies are visible on the left of the political spectrum. These actors often identify the European Union as the root cause of many of the ‘evils’ that nationalist movements claim to tackle. In this regard, European integration is seen as a fundamental attack on the imagined community of the sovereign nation state.

The central objective of the project is to analyze, through a series of case studies, both the extent and possible impact of the proliferation of disinformation and fake news via digital and other media, but also through more conventional mobilization and communication mechanisms, on processes of legitimation and delegitimation of European integration in the public sphere.

Saturday 28 September, 2021

Panel explores post-truth and online abuse with an intersectional and postcolonial lens, with speakers Seyi Akiwowo and Dr Pavan Malreddy.

Post-Truth Politics: Silencing, Violence and Resistance in Public Debate

Since the EU referendum and Donald Trump’s election to the US presidency in 2016, scholars and commentators have spoken of the emergence of a ‘post-truth era’, defined as a break-down in ‘rational’ opinion in favour of emotion. The election of populist authoritarian ‘strongmen’ such as Trump, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has seen continued attacks on immigrants, ‘experts’, and mainstream politicians. The present moment is also one in which women, girls, people of colour and queer individuals are receiving an unprecedented amount of abuse, with a significant amount of this abuse occurring online and being of a violent, sexualised and racist nature. The concept of ‘post-truth’ has been criticised for overlooking the long history of marginalisation of people of colour and other minority groups from knowledge construction. Furthermore, it risks reproducing a public/private and rational/emotion binary embedded within the Enlightenment separation of ‘mind’ and ‘body’ that underpinned the European colonial project and served to marginalise women, non-binary people and people of colour from citizenship. This panel explores the connections between post-truth politics, online violence and the ongoing relevance of coloniality to contemporary political life. Bringing together postcolonial perspectives from the Global South and intersectional feminist approaches to online abuse, it investigates what are often conceived as discrete, private and anonymous acts of online abuse within a global context in which the concepts of truth, expertise, and trust are being progressively denigrated.

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Thursday 29 April, 2021

Post-truth politics, mediatization and politicization of immigration

How do misinformation, denial and distortion of facts, and other aspects of post-truth politics take shape in different European countries? Researchers from Denmark, Finland and Switzerland discuss their recent and ongoing research with a focus on how the politicized rhetoric of immigration, racism and misogyny is constructed and challenged in media environments.

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Thursday 18 March, 2021

Open seminar: The Covid pandemic against the backdrop of post-truth politics

Controversies surrounding the question of how best to tackle the ongoing Covid pandemic are a striking illustration of the challenges of post-truth politics for liberal democracies. Social and other digital media provide an infrastructure through which deliberate disinformation and conspiracy theories can spread more easily than ever before. At the same time, populist politicians have fuelled a disdain for scientific expertise and even for basic facts. In various liberal democracies, this has created political cultures in which the symbolic authority of the truth has been fundamentally undermined, accompanied by an erosion of trust in established media institutions. Yet at the same time, the pandemic has also served as a reminder of the necessity of scientific research and trust in the institutions that communicate the findings of such research.

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