Scholars Must Recognize the Role of Affect and Emotion in Disinformation

This perspective is part of a series of provocations published on Tech Policy Press in advance of a symposium at the University of Pittsburgh’s Communication Technology Research Lab (CTRL) on threats to knowledge and US democracy.

In a “post-truth” era defined by “alternative facts” and “fake news,” calls for media literacy have gained new urgency but face technological, social, and institutional headwinds. Meanwhile, the sources of disinformation adapt and multiply. Interventions designed to help the public process information and better evaluate logic are necessary but not sufficient because the issues we face are not confined to information or logic problems. Modern thought distortion—targeted propaganda, misinformation, conspiracism, and so on—is, above all, a problem of affect. “Affect” refers to the predispositions, intensities, and attachments that condition how we respond emotionally to stimuli.

Although affect by definition resists direct observation, actors such as Cambridge Analytica have long recognized that motivated reasoning, cognitive heuristics, and confirmation bias are all magnified by feeling. We—academics, educators, journalists, and activists—must help to cultivate what literary theorist Kenneth Burke called “equipment for living” accessible to anyone targeted by persuasion at the intersection of emotion and media, whether it be speech, text, images, or video. Doing so requires that we formulate responses even when our objects of study are difficult to pin down with certainty.

The tactics of digital emotional manipulation are many and varied, but many of the most prominent exploit frustration and rage. Social media algorithms may reward engagement indiscriminately—traffic driven by anger still seems to generate at least as much attention as that driven by pleasure, and companies have shown unwillingness to police themselves in the past. Trolling culture is now generalized online and used at the highest levels of government in the United States. Trolling exploits sincerity through provocations which spark either an emotional reaction, which is then mocked and cast as evidence of instability or stupidity, or a refusal to “feed the trolls,” which lets the attack stand and may move the Overton window.