The effects of social media disinformation are overblown and show little causative relationship between it, election results and polarization

Methodologically, it is very difficult to research whether fake news indeed alters voting behaviour (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017).1 While ‘fake news’ indeed spreads fast around social networks, this does not mean that people actually believe these stories or that they change actual behaviour or political convictions. It is true that disinformation seems to have at least some power to set the agenda of mainstream news (Vargo et al., 2017). But even though confirmation bias and polarization play a role (Del Vicario et al., 2016), echo chambers do not play a decisive role in the outcomes of elections (Bail et al., 2020; Boulianne et al., 2020). Research on the spread and impact of fake news usually assumes that people sharing these stories believe in them and that reading these stories will alter their political behaviour. However, sharing stories is never only about sharing (neutral) information but also involves an affective dimension (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017, p. 7). Based on previous research, we can detect two ways in which fake news is ultimately not about the (lack of) veracity of the stories but the way they work on an affectual dimension. The first crucial aspect concerns clickbait, the second how sharing stories is an expression of identity. Let me briefly discuss both aspects in turn. As Tommaso Venturini states succinctly ‘junk news is not about algorithmic persuasion’ (Venturini, 2019, p. 123). He, among others, argues that people spread ‘fake news’ items even though they do not believe them. They are shared because people might want to debunk them or make fun of them (Venturini, 2019, p. 126). Since the point is not about the ‘fakeness’ as such, Venturini prefers to speak about ‘junk news’ or ‘viral news’ (Venturini, 2019, p. 126). Fake news items work since they are addictive and grab our attention – even if we do not believe them. They are produced because they hold our attention which can then be translated into monetary revenue. A whole political economy has developed around fake or junk news (Bakir & McStay, 2018). This shows that fake news as a phenomenon is very complex and we need to consider economic aspects that shape how news stories are produced and shared. Indeed, when we look at research on fake news in the field of sociology, we can observe another reason why the phenomenon of fake news is not best explained by only looking at quantitative signifiers. Following up on the role of the affective dimension, Polletta and Callahan (Polletta & Callahan, 2017; see also: Hochschild, 2016b) have proposed that we should understand the sharing of fake news less as an act of rational information sharing than as an act of identity expression. The authors argue that sharing fake news in the US presidential election can be better understood as an expression of a common identity. The question of whether people ‘really’ believed in these stories is then secondary. Disinformation thus becomes something that is not simply about a lack of facts in news but also about people being emotionally attached to certain news and their emotional reactions that help them assess the veracity of news stories (Boler & Davis 2018, pp. 78–79). People identify with certain news and use the sharing of news as an expression of their identity and their belonging to a specific social group (Polletta & Callahan, 2017, p. 400). We should be less concerned with the direct impact of disinformation than with what it reveals as a symptom of broader changes in political communication and media consumption. Junk news aim at affective reactions such as a feeling of partisanship or deep social division (Venturini, 2019; Young, 2021, p. 5). Sharing fake news seems to occur for multiple reasons and the emergence of ‘information disorder’ or ‘junk news’ is a symptom of changes in the media landscape and a distinct political economy based on clickbait. As a consequence, more recent research has investigated the debates that revolve around fake news (Creech, 2020; Farkas & Schou, 2018; Monsees, 2020; Wasserman, 2020). That is why, in this article, I focus on how debates over fake news and disinformation rely on specific arguments and ideas that ultimately help, for example, delegitimise certain opinions or present fake news as a security threat. Conceptually, I read the debates on fake news

in Germany, Czechia and the US through ideas on democracy. In the next section, I discuss democratic theories and their presence in debates on disinformation.