Marwick, A. E., Schnabel, E., McGregor, S., & Schmitt, C. (2026). Disinformation as cultural narrative: Conceptualizing disinformation as cross-platform, identity-affirming, cathartic stories. Political Communication, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2026.2644198
Summary
Marwick, Schnabel, McGregor, and Schmitt reconceptualize disinformation as cultural narrative rather than discrete false claims. Drawing on three U.S. cases from 2017–2019 — the nonpartisan “Lottery Manure” satire, the right-wing “Parkland Crisis Actor” conspiracy, and the left-wing “Pee Tape” rumor — they argue that successful disinformation circulates as stories with characters, settings, and plots, signaled by discursive and visual catchphrases. These narratives spread because they affirm partisan and moral identities, cohere with audiences’ “deep stories,” and deliver cathartic emotional payoffs of humor, outrage, or desire. The reframing explains why fact-checking, media literacy, and domain-level moderation routinely fail: they target propositions, while disinformation operates as ritual storytelling that traverses memes, late-night comedy, news aggregation, Kickstarter campaigns, and video games.
Key Contributions
- A narrative-based theoretical framework integrating deep stories, identity propaganda, affect, and spreadability into disinformation studies.
- One of the first sustained empirical analyses of a left-wing disinformation case (the Pee Tape), theorizing how mainstream media amplify disinformation that aligns with elite liberal moral frames.
- A demonstration that cross-platform, cross-genre analysis is necessary — challenging single-platform and domain-level methods.
- An argument for why fact-checking and individual media literacy are structurally insufficient against identity-affirming, cathartic narratives.
- A publicly available qualitative dataset and replicable case-comparison methodology.
Methods
Theory-generating qualitative case study following Luker’s “logic of discovery.” The authors built a cross-platform URL corpus using Twitter’s Academic API, CrowdTangle, and the Social Science One Condor dataset, sampling top-shared URLs per case and capping high-frequency domains for a final corpus of 359 URLs across the three cases. A five-coder team double-coded each URL with descriptive memos capturing genre, author, headline, domain, and partisan slant, resolving disagreements through discussion. The Wayback Machine was used to recover deplatformed material.
Findings
- All three cases functioned as narratives recognizable through synecdochic catchphrases and visual cues (the laughing mugshot, David Hogg images, the yellow VHS tape).
- Narratives were retold across satire, blogs, tweets, memes, Claymation, SNL sketches, Kickstarter products, aggregated news, and late-night comedy — preserving consistent characters, settings, and plots.
- Each story carried moral evaluations: righteous revenge against a bad boss; media/government deception (or moral condemnation of conspiracists); just shaming of a corrupt president.
- Desire for the story to be true — not evidence of truth — energized engagement, with commenters explicitly wishing it were real.
- Humor and catharsis allowed mainstream outlets to cover disinformative content by reporting on comedians, bypassing objectivity norms.
- Aggregation amplified outrage by recycling the same event across outlets in condemnatory language.
- The Pee Tape was not debunked by major fact-checkers and was treated as “shorthand” rather than a factual claim, showing how elite frame alignment shields speculative claims from scrutiny.
- Visual catchphrases evoked entire narratives without textual elaboration, functioning equivalently to discursive ones.
Connections
This paper extends a broader argument about reframing platform-era communication beyond information transmission toward ritual, identity, and meaning — resonating with Baym2026-tr on relational and cultural dimensions of media and with Marwick2026-ss in its attention to networked identity and audience dynamics. Its critique of fact-checking and domain-level moderation as inadequate to cultural narrative also speaks to broader rethinkings of platform governance found in Boyd2026-op and Swartz2026-zb.
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