Disinformation as cultural narrative: Conceptualizing disinformation as cross-platform, identity-affirming, cathartic stories

Summary

Despite a title invoking disinformation, this reflective essay is an autobiographical meditation on what platform-era social media has foreclosed. Marwick draws on two decades of personal fieldnotes — Prodigy, IRC, VAX/VMS bulletin boards, and especially LiveJournal in the early 2000s — to argue that the small, semi-private, subcultural writing communities of the early internet enabled forms of reciprocity, vulnerability, and lifelong attachment that contemporary scale-and-engagement platforms structurally cannot. The current state of social media, she insists, was not inevitable: it is the contingent product of advertising-driven political economy, surveillance, consolidation, and algorithmic optimization, and different design and governance choices could have cultivated more humane publics.

Key Contributions

• A first-person historiographic account of pre-platform sociality, contributing to the cultural memory of the early internet.
• A normative critique of platform political economy paired with a call for alternative infrastructural imaginaries.
• A reframing of social media as social infrastructure requiring stewardship, rather than as a commercial product optimized for ad revenue.
• A generative provocation: rebuilding online community will not come from re-implementing mega-platforms (e.g., Bluesky-as-Twitter) but from reimagining small-scale, reciprocal infrastructures.

Methods

Critical-essayistic reflection rather than empirical study. Marwick mobilizes autobiographical fieldnotes and historical recollection of specific platforms, situating personal experience within broader debates in platform studies and the critical political economy of social media.

Findings

• LiveJournal’s granular friends-only filters supported audience management, trust, and sustained reciprocal writing — producing lifelong friendships and partnerships.
• The subcultural, small-user-base character of early platforms was integral to their intimacy and is structurally difficult to reproduce at platform scale.
• Contemporary platforms generate harassment, polarization, and corporate capture, pushing users toward ambient, ephemeral, or encrypted-chat alternatives.
• What has been lost is not just particular features but an entire ethos of vulnerability and care within bounded publics.

Connections

This essay sits squarely within the Social Media + Society anniversary cluster reflecting on what platformization has foreclosed; it pairs especially closely with Baym2026-tr on relational and community dimensions of online life, and with Boyd2026-op on the trajectory and governance of networked publics. Swartz2026-zb complements its political-economic critique of platform infrastructures, while Marwick2026-ss extends the author’s own through-line on self-presentation and networked privacy that grounds the LiveJournal analysis here.

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