Beyond Verification| Portraits of Mis-/Disinformation Through the Research Persona Method

Abstract

Large-scale problems like our current climate crisis require productive engagement by global publics not only in word, thought, and deed but also in feeling. All of these aspects are vulnerable to disruption by mis- and disinformation, especially as it emerges interactively on the online platforms that host most of our discourse. Scholarship has focused on the possibilities and limitations of fact-based intervention and on apprehending false information’s influence at scale, but doing so misses an important aspect of its operation, namely its manipulation of individual users’ affect. Employing speculative research personas, an innovative research method formulated by Bounegru, Devries, and Weltevrede, we investigate these affective impacts on Instagram and TikTok. We find that, in subtle and less subtle ways, the mediated experience of these platforms produced affective environments that, even when not directly radicalizing, led users away from capacities important to addressing crises, such as the capacity to conceive and be energized by common goals across lines of social difference. We conclude that affective intervention is needed alongside rational intervention, noting how these platforms’ combination of affordances and aesthetics enables microfascist content and desensitize paranormal absurdism.