Suspicious stories: taking narrative seriously in disinformation research

Summary

Sadler argues that disinformation studies invokes “narrative” loosely, treating stories’ meanings as transparent and their truth-status reducible to true/false judgments. Drawing on Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, narratology (Bal, Chatman, Genette), and Phelan’s narrative ethics, he proposes a “hermeneutic realist” alternative in which narratives disclose aspects of reality rather than mirror or construct it, and in which ethical appraisal of telling and told supplements referential assessment. He demonstrates the framework on five Spanish-language tweets by Venezuelan influencer Roi López Rivas blaming NATO enlargement for Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, showing that content can be ethically and referentially problematic without containing outright falsehoods.

Key Contributions

• A theoretically disciplined definition of narrative (temporally and causally related happenings) distinguishing it from discourse, theme, or frame.
• A “hermeneutic realist” middle path between naïve realism and constructivism for evaluating narrative truth in disinformation research.
• An adaptation of Phelan’s narrative ethics (ethics of the telling vs. the told; reporting/interpreting/evaluating) as an analytical instrument for suspect stories.
• A worked analytical method pairing fabula/sjuzhet analysis with ethical appraisal, applied to a non-elite, Spanish-language, Global South case.
• A challenge to the field’s “cryptonormativity,” urging that evaluative criteria be made explicit and contestable.

Methods

Conceptual synthesis across narratology, hermeneutic philosophy, and the strategic narrative tradition, paired with a single-case qualitative narrative analysis of five tweets (Feb 2022–Aug 2023) by Roi López Rivas. The analysis moves between fabula and sjuzhet to identify what is reported, interpreted, evaluated, disnarrated, and sideshadowed, before appraising the narrative on both referential and ethical grounds.

Findings

• The tweets contain few outright false statements; instead they rely on imprecision, ambiguous referents, and ventriloquized voices to avoid commitment to questionable claims.
• Sideshadowing attributes agency and contingency to NATO/US actors while disnarrating Russian agency, producing a deterministic account where Russia “had no other option.”
• Apparent multivocality (Putin, Biden, Brand, Stoltenberg) functions monologically, funnelling diverse voices into a single interpretive line.
• Evaluation is delivered implicitly via presupposed moral principles applied asymmetrically to Russia and the US.
• The narrative is thus referentially thin and ethically Manichean without being demonstrably “false” — and NATO’s own debunking materials can mirror these simplifications.

Connections

This paper sits with other work pushing disinformation studies beyond infocentric, true/false framings: it resonates with normative-conceptual critiques like Farkas2026-lr and Marwick2025-ov, and with calls to study disinformation as meaning-making and storytelling rather than discrete claims, including Starbird2025-jj on collaborative narrative production and Frischlich2025-vn. Its attention to a Global South, Spanish-language influencer also complements geographically broadening work such as Cazzamatta2026-lo and Humprecht2025-ml.