CfP Disinformation-for-Hire and Click Farming around the World

Special collection of Social Media + Society (Open Access Journal)

Abstract submission deadline: October 9, 2021

Full paper submission deadline: March 30, 2022

Editors: Rafael Grohmann (Unisinos University, Brazil) and Jonathan Corpus Ong (University of Massachusetts-Amherst, USA)

From state-sponsored propagandists using paid troll armies, to commercially motivated data analytics firms selling their toolkits to politicians, and platform workers producing memes for overseas clients, the global industry of disinformation production has only professionalized and diversified. This special issue for Social Media + Society aims to deepen understanding about the social identities, work arrangements, and political and commercial motivations of an emerging class of digital disinformation workers. We are interested in critical and interdisciplinary research that examines the political economy, specifically the digital and creative industries that propel and produce disinformation. 

The special issue’s focus on business models and disinformation worker identities in global context aims to expand on disinformation studies’ analysis of “fake news” and hate speech as content that require better policing or fact-checking. It also aims to expand platform studies’ research agenda and consider the range of digital professionals and entrepreneurs who buy and sell engagement on social media–with pernicious political consequences especially in contexts where critical voices are suppressed.

Thus, we solicit submissions that discuss the diverse worker hierarchies and conditions, outsourced gig arrangements, money politics, and/or regulatory loopholes in the promotional industries that enable the strategic production of  disinformation. We are interested in interdisciplinary and ethnographic research that engages with the deep stories of workers in “dark PR” firms (Silverman, Lytyvenko & Kung 2020; Verwey & Muir 2019), data analytics firms (Briant 2021), Latin American and Indonesian Instagram click farms (Lindquist, 2019; 2021), and “propaganda secretary” offices (Hassan & Hitchen, 2019). We are also interested in normative discussions about complicity and collusion in digital industries as well as scholarly self-reflection about the challenges of doing engaged research about disinformation (Ong 2020). 

The special issue will include an interview with ProPublica’s Craig Silverman and a response to the special issue by Dr Joan Donovan. 

We are especially interested in articles that shed light across these themes: 

• precarity, aspiration, and the tactics of resistance of digital workers / disinformation producers 
• ethnographic portraits of “paid trolls”, meme producers, and political strategists
• the ethics of representing perpetrators; whistleblowers as unreliable narrators
• participatory disinformation (Starbird 2021) or networked disinformation
• the infrastructure, materiality, and “platform trees” (van Dijck 2020) of click farm platforms with mainstream social media
• moral justifications in disinformation work (Ong & Cabanes 2019)
• the complicity of advertising and public relations to “organized lying” (Edwards 2021)
• legitimacy, respectability, and plausible deniability: the role of intermediaries or brokers in the disinformation industries
• mental health of workers in disinformation shadow economies
• the social proximities between content moderators and paid trolls in the global South
• regulatory loopholes in political marketing and PR; experiments with self-regulation and codes of ethics (Udupa 2019)
• auto-ethnographic reflections of engaged scholars about their experiences working with governments, platforms, workers, and journalists to shed light on disinformation shadow economies

Timeline

300- to 500-word abstracts should be emailed to rafaelgrohmann@unisinos.br and jcong@umass.edu by October 1, 2021. The abstract should articulate: 1) the issue or research question to be discussed, 2) the methodological or critical framework used, and 3) the expected findings or conclusions. Decisions will be communicated to the authors by November 1, 2021. Full papers of the selected abstracts should be submitted by March 15, 2022.

References

Briant, E. (2021). Lessons from the Cambridge Analytica Crisis: Confronting Today’s (Dis)information Challenges. The Journal of Intelligence, Conflict, and Warfare, 3(3), 125–127. https://doi.org/10.21810/jicw.v3i3.2775

Edwards. L. (2021). Organised Lying and Professional Legitimacy: Public Relations’ Accountability in the Disinformation Debate. European Journal of Communication, 36(2), 168–182. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323120966851 

Hassan, I. & Hitchen, J. (2019, April 18). Nigeria’s Propaganda Secretaries. Mail & Guardian. https://mg.co.za/article/2019-04-18-00-nigerias-propaganda-secretaries/

Lindquist, J. (2021). Good Enough Imposters: The Market for Instagram Followers in Indonesia and Beyond. In: Woolgar, S. et al (eds). The Imposter as Social Theory: Thinking with Gatecrashers, Cheats and Charlatans. Bristol University Press.

Ong, J.C. (2020). “Limits and Luxuries of Slow Research in Times of Radical War: How Should We Represent Perpetrators?” Journal of Digital War 1(1): 1-6. 

Ong, J. C., & Cabañes, J. V. A. (2019). When Disinformation Studies Meets Production Studies: Social Identities and Moral Justifications in the Political Trolling Industry. International Journal of Communication, 13, 5771–5790.

Silverman, C., Lytyvenko, J. & Kung, W. (2020, January 6). Disinformation for Hire: How a New Breed of PR Firms Is Selling Lies Online. Buzzfeed News. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/disinformation-for-hire-black-pr-firms 

Starbird, K. (2021, May 6). Participatory Disinformation: The Big Lie during the 2020 Election and the January 6, 2021 Attack on the US Capitol. Twitter thread. https://twitter.com/katestarbird/status/1390408145428643842 

Udupa, S. (2019, January 31). India Needs a Fresh Strategy to Tackle Online Extreme Speech. Engage. https://www.epw.in/engag e/article/election-2019-india-needs-fresh-strategy-totackle-new- digital-tools. 

Van Dijck, J. (2020) Seeing the forest for the trees: Visualizing platformization and its governance. New Media & Society. Epub ahead of print.

Verwey, S., & Muir, C. (2019). Bell Pottinger and the Dark Art of Public Relations: Ethics of individuality Versus Ethics of Communality. Communicare: Journal for Communication Sciences in Southern Africa, 38(1), 96-116.