(Mis)Translating Deceit: Disinformation as a Translingual, Discursive Dynamic

Vera Tolz, Stephen Hutchings, Vitaly Kazakov and Sofia Tipaldou, 'Disinformation as Process: Modelling the Lifecycle of Disinformation,' Communication Theory, May 2025.

Abstract:

This article offers a new conceptual model of disinformation which accounts for the performative status of disinformation accusations, and the dialogistic interaction between accusers and accused, within a multi-aspectual dynamic process involving diverse actors (including those disassociated from various forms of deceit). The model shows how claims acquire or lose their disinformation status, as they transgress temporal, geopolitical, and linguacultural boundaries, those of media genre and platform, as well as, crucially, the boundary separating primary (disinformation) from secondary (counter-disinformation) discourses. We call our model “the lifecycle of disinformation,” as it captures both disinformation’s linear trajectories, and its capacity for constant self-renewal. While eschewing relativism, the article challenges the understanding of disinformation as referentially stable, demonstrably false content which still frames much disinformation research and underpins the working principles of counter-disinformation units (CDUs). To reconceive disinformation according to this model, we develop a 5-step analytical apparatus applicable in future research.

Link to the Online First Open Access version: https://academic.oup.com/ct/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ct/qtaf009/8151020?utm_source=authortollfreelink&utm_campaign=ct&utm_medium=email&guestAccessKey=d793947c-5463-4021-9f09-c4e9cbc8c193 [track.smtpsendmail.com]

We are pleased to announce that our report, in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Toronto, has been published.

Abstract

Disinformation is now the status quo. Beyond the facts of the matter—false claims to be fact-checked or governmental narratives to be debunked—broader forces are shaping our everyday informational landscape. These forces reweight and reorder opportunities to speak, engage, express and represent oneself, limiting our capacity to know, understand, and participate in the world around us. Identity matters as much to this landscape as facts. Repressive legal templates and restrictive economic interventions redefine how we individually or collectively participate in digital life. These changes leave only narrow openings—apertures that permit limited ways of belonging to collective, interpretive communities—while foreclosing so many other possibilities for public life.By linking these domains of identity, authoritarianism, law and economics, this stakeholder and policy report surveys recent academic literature and journalistic best-practices to demonstrate how the contemporary informational landscape reduces opportunities for local, transnational and global experiences of collective engagement to the strategic needs of governments or the competing commercial imperatives of platform and data economies.

You can download the report below, and can use this link to share the article online (https://utoronto.scholaris.ca/items/54fef724-a6d2-478c-b96e-4d00ba494ec7)

Maksim Markelov published his article in the May issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It is available on Open Access, and you can read it via the link here -https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2025.2488676#references-Section.

The COVID-19 pandemic was not just a public health crisis but a crisis of confidence—one that revealed the fragility of public trust in scientific expertise, democratic institutional governance, and the very mechanisms by which societies establish trust and determine truth. The pandemic brought many existing geopolitical tensions to the fore, with several state-aligned actors from various countries—including both authoritarian regimes and liberal democracies—taking to social media to engage in what could be seen as aggressive vaccine diplomacy as well as covert operations targeting rivals. Russian state-aligned social media actors seized on this moment of uncertainty—not to promote any coherent counter-narrative, but to make coherence itself elusive. Their strategy was not to persuade but to confuse, amplifying deep-seated anxieties and contradictions, fostering ideological polarization, and transforming pandemic discourse into yet another site of contestation. By strategically amplifying both vaccine skepticism and criticism of government failure and overreach, this operation did not merely seek to instill doubt in a particular version of reality. Rather, it aimed to erode faith in the very possibility of a shared reality altogether. This deliberate amplification of uncertainties carries consequences that extend far beyond COVID-19.

This report by our project team assesses the extent, nature, purpose and efficacy of online Russian state-sponsored efforts to promote Russia’s strategic narratives and exercise political influence in Europe, in the aftermath of bans imposed in the West on Russian state media following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Focusing on the recent EU2024 elections, the report offers findings and policy recommendations based on analysis of the output of five outlets with confirmed Kremlin sponsorship (Reliable Recent News (RRN); Berliner Tageszeitung (BTZ); Voice of Europe (VoE); France et EU; and Pravda-EN/Pravda-FR/Pravda-DE).

The report is available for download below.

New open access book on disinformation and liberal democracy 'Russia, Disinformation and the Liberal Order: RT as Populist Pariah' by Stephen Hutchings, Vera Tolz, Precious Chatterje-Doody, Rhys Crilley and Marie Gillespie is out in October 2024. It is based on first full analysis of RT, the Kremlin’s primary foreign propaganda tool.

Russia, Disinformation and the Liberal Order 

• interrogates and critiques commonplace notions of disinformation
• investigates the threat it poses to democracy via first systematic analysis of RT, the Kremlin’s primary foreign propaganda tool 
• illuminates wider communications strategies pursued by authoritarian states and grassroots populist movements
• reveals the interlinked nature of global media-politics pathologies
• argues that the challenge they pose requires reflection on liberalism's own blind spots, and a vigorous defence of open-minded impartiality

The book provides insights into RT's

• institutional culture, and journalistic ethos
• activities across multiple languages and media platforms
• audience-targeting strategies and audience engagement
• stance on Ukraine war and on Western responses to it
• reflexive relationship with pariah status reinforced by those responses

Download the book for free at Project Muse: https://muse.jhu.edu/book/123417

For the print version of the book, use the promo code 09BCARD at the publisher's website to get a 30% discount: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501777639/russia-disinformation-and-the-liberal-order/#bookTabs=3

In the new open access article in the journal Cultural Studies, Stephen Hutchings constructively critiques the discourse practices of counter-disinformation units (CDUs). At the same time, he disavows bad-faith populist attacks on counter-disinformation as detrimental to ‘free speech’.

The activities of autocracies, conspiracists and other bad actors in the communications sphere represent a threat to democracies and their citizens. CDUs play a vital role in monitoring and combatting that threat. However, the rapid growth of counter-disinformation operations since 2016 has led to significant gaps, contradictions and inconsistencies in these practices. Specifically, Stephen highlights problems in the way that disinformation and linked phenomena are described and studied, and in how CDUs negotiate their relationship with democracy itself.

Applying critical discourse methods to the mission statements of key CDUs, he shows how they interweave three functions (identity, performativity, and representation) to articulate liberal democracy’s ‘discursive formation’, but in so doing, expose its fault lines. CDU failure to reconcile competing accounts of truth creates contradictions between liberal emphases on capitalist efficiency and the democratic prioritizing of popular power; dispassionate observation and civic participation; transparency and surveillance.

Stephen concludes that the absolutist epistemology (a remnant of the Cold War) designed to cover up these paradoxes masks the awkward relationship between truth and deception in politics generally. This epistemology hinders the emergence of alternative forms of knowledge capable of embracing truth in its full complexity and facilitating democratic renewal.

The article is available open access via this link: 

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09502386.2024.2384942?src=#abstract

Stephen Hutchings authored Chapter 3 'The Holocaust and Russia’s Cinematic Go-Betweens: Cultural Diplomatic Internationalism or Covert Information Warfare?' in the book Alexander Rojavin and Helen Haft (ed.), Modern Russian Cinema as a Battleground in Russia's Information War (Routledge, 2024).

More information about the book here: https://www.routledge.com/Modern-Russian-Cinema-as-a-Battleground-in-Russias-Information-War/Rojavin-Haft/p/book/9781032398174

In a recently published open access article for the journal Slavica Tergestina vol. 31 (2023, no. II), Stephen Hutchings discusses the Channel ‘Russia-1’ Miniseries ‘The Optimists’, shown in two seasons in 2017 and 2021. The article analyses the miniseries to demonstrate how, even within the highly restricted authoritarian media environment that persists under Putin, television drama can play a subliminal political role in foregrounding modes of transculturation that bring Soviet and post-Soviet identities into productive dialogue with the Western Other against which they are habitually defined. This dialogue is conducted across several axes – temporal, spatial and representational – and navigates a complex and oscillating path between the value zones of diplomacy, patriotic/treacherous double agency, and cosmopolitan universalism. The framing context of the current war in Ukraine adds new relevance to the future potential of such phenomena to restore mutual engagement between Russia and a Western world from which it is presently alienated.

The article is available via this link: https://www.openstarts.units.it/entities/publication/63e6df73-d153-4fe7-9f29-bb1135ad23a9/details

Co-authored by Václav Štětka and Sabina Mihelj, this book provides the first systematic analysis of the role of the media in the rise of illiberalism, based on an original theoretical framework and extensive empirical research in Eastern Europe – a region that serves as a key battleground in the global advance of illiberalism. Liberal democracies across the world are facing a range of challenges, from the growing influence of illiberal leaders and parties to deepening polarization and declining trust in political elites and mainstream media. Although these developments attracted significant scholarly attention, the factors that contribute to the spreading of illiberalism remain poorly understood, and the communication perspective on illiberalism is particularly underdeveloped.

Štětka and Mihelj address this gap by introducing the concept of the illiberal public sphere, identifying the key stages in its development, and explaining what makes illiberalism distinct from related phenomena such as populism. Their analysis reveals how and why the changing communication environment facilitates selective exposure to ideologically and politically homogeneous sources, fosters changes in normative assumptions that guide media trust, increases vulnerability to disinformation, and goes hand in hand with growing hostility to immigration and LGBTQ+ rights. The findings challenge widespread assumptions about digital platforms as key channels of illiberalism and suggest that their role shifts as the illiberal sphere progresses.

The arguments presented in this book have important implications for future research on challenges to liberal democracy, as well as for journalists, media regulators and other professionals committed to rebuilding media trust and containing the forces of polarization.                 

The book is open access and is available here:

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-54489-7

In this article, co-authored with Andy Byford and Connor Doak, Stephen Hutchings revisits their co-edited volume Transnational Russian Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020) in light of the recent developments after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The article appeared online first in the journal Forum for Modern Language Studies. It is available via the link:
https://academic.oup.com/fmls/advance-article/doi/10.1093/fmls/cqae038/7685259?login=false

The article, co-authored by Anastasiya Pshenychnykh, Alena Pfoser, and Sabina Mihelj, appeared in the journal Social Media + Society online first. In the context of increasing conflicts over material heritage around the world, this article examines the role digital media play in battles over monuments. The rise of digital media brought significant changes to the cultural dynamics of heritage conflicts, which have not been adequately addressed in existing literature. Bringing together work on monuments, (digital) memory conflicts, and digital activism, we identify three key dimensions of monument battles in which the impact of digital media is most clearly visible: (a) participation, democratization, and deterritorialization; (b) reframing and contestation; and (c) mobilization and the online-offline movement of heritage battles. We illustrate these arguments drawing on a critical discourse analysis of monument battles on the messaging application Telegram in the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, using a sample of 940 posts from both pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian channels. We demonstrate that despite potentially providing space for alternative memory interpretations, online memory contestations over heritage contributed to the construction of polarized and mutually exclusive worlds.

The article is open access and available via the link:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20563051241242788

This short article, authored by Stephen Hutchings, appeared in the Russia Program Journal. It outlines some of the key ideas and ambitions of our project.

The article is available at: https://online.flippingbook.com/view/65937120/6/