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 as discrete false facts. On their account, disinformation succeeds not because audiences mistake it for true, but because it functions as a story — with characters, settings, and plots — that affirms partisan or moral identities and delivers emotional catharsis through humor and outrage. Drawing on three U.S. case studies from 2017–2019 (the nonpartisan “Lottery Manure” satire, the right-wing “Parkland Crisis Actor” conspiracy, and the left-wing “Pee Tape” rumor), the authors argue that these narratives travel across platforms and genres, signaled by compact discursive and visual catchphrases. This reframing explains why fact-checking, media literacy, and domain-level detection struggle: they target facts and platforms, not stories, identities, and emotions.
Key Contributions
- Advances a narrative-based theoretical framework for disinformation, integrating deep stories, identity propaganda, emotion, and spreadability.
- Provides a rare sustained empirical analysis of a left-wing disinformation case (the Pee Tape) and theorizes how mainstream media amplify disinformation that aligns with elite liberal frames.
- Demonstrates the necessity of cross-platform and cross-genre analysis, challenging single-platform and domain-level classification approaches.
- Articulates why fact-checking and individual media literacy are insufficient against identity-affirming, cathartic narratives.
- Supplies a publicly available OSF qualitative dataset and a replicable case-comparison methodology.
Methods
Qualitative, theory-generating case study work following a “logic of discovery.” The team selected three illustrative cases spanning right-wing, left-wing, and nonpartisan disinformation, then built a cross-platform URL corpus using Twitter’s Academic Research API, Facebook CrowdTangle, and the Social Science One “Condor” dataset. Top-shared URLs were sampled, deduplicated, and capped by domain, yielding 359 URLs total (27 Lottery Manure, 99 Parkland Crisis Actor, 233 Pee Tape). A five-member team coded each URL twice using descriptive memos (content type, genre, author, headline, domain, partisan slant), resolving disagreements through discussion. The Wayback Machine was used to recover deplatformed content.
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 many genres — satire, blogs, tweets, memes, Claymation, SNL sketches, Kickstarter products, aggregation, late-night comedy — while keeping characters, settings, and plots consistent.
- Each carried moral evaluations: righteous revenge, media/government deception (or condemnation of conspiracists), and just shaming of a corrupt president.
- Desire for the story to be true, not evidence of truth, energized engagement; commenters openly wished the stories were real.
- Humor and catharsis let mainstream outlets cover disinformation by reporting on comedians’ coverage, bypassing objectivity norms.
- Aggregation amplified moral outrage by repeatedly reporting the same event in condemnatory language.
- The Pee Tape was not debunked by major fact-checkers and was treated as “shorthand,” showing how alignment with elite media frames shields speculative claims from scrutiny.
- Visual catchphrases worked equivalently to discursive ones, evoking whole narratives without text.
Connections
This paper is a cornerstone of the cultural/narrative turn in disinformation research and connects directly to the authors’ related work on identity propaganda and networked media manipulation in Marwick2025-ov and Marwick2025-vx. Its emphasis on emotion, moral framing, and the limits of fact-checking speaks to work on inoculation and correction such as van-der-Linden2026-jt, while its cross-platform, ecosystem-level view of how manipulation circulates resonates with participatory and multi-platform accounts like Starbird2025-jj and Donovan2025-ws. The argument that partisan identity and moral frames drive spread also links to research on partisan asymmetries and affective engagement such as Frischlich2025-vn and Humprecht2025-ml.
Podcast
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