The public’s appropriation of multimodal discourses of fake news on social media

ABSTRACT

This study empirically examines tweets and Instagram posts that reference the hashtag #fakenews in connection to Canadian issues to understand the nature of the public’s political and multimodal discourses. Taken from larger datasets consisting of over 255,000 Instagram posts and over 14 million tweets, we used a mixed method, partly analyzing more than 4100 most retweeted messages and Instagram posts and manually categorizing them into seven topic types along with their political tone. Theoretically, we argue that the term fake news has lost its core meaning as it is appropriated by the social media public to communicate a variety of messages especially in relation to politics. The findings show that although there are differences between the two social media platforms, the majority of Instagram and Twitter topics that reference fake news are political in nature and anti-liberal in tone. Methodologically, the inclusion of multimodal analysis helps identify the sentiment and emotional aspects which are critical aspects for the spread of fake news and polarization on social media. Despite the different political contexts, our findings on Instagram and Twitter align with other studies that examined political polarization and the prevalence of conservative voices in the United States.

KEYWORDS:

• fake news
• Instagram
• polarization
• politics
• social media
• Twitter

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The following keywords were used: “canada,” “canadian,” “trudeau,” “justintrudeau,” “toronto,” “montreal,” “vancouver,” “ottawa,” “onpoli,” “polqc,” “cdnpoli,” “scheer,” “thejagmeetsingh,” “jagmeet singh,” “topoli,” “quebec,” “qcpoli,” “halifax,” “edmonton,” “calgary,” “alberta,” “ontario,” “winnipeg,” “manitoba,” “saskatchewan,” “british columbia”

² The top ten most mentioned Twitter users are as follows: @justintrudeau (n = 3436), @ezralevant (n = 2726), @paola_dec1231 (n = 2057, deleted account), @realdonaldtrump (n = 1450, deleted account), @cbcnews (n = 1356), @therebeltv (n = 1035), @ctvnews (n = 837), @globalnews (n = 763), @canadamediabias (n = 751), and @cnn (n = 621).

³ For example, one post which was retweeted 52 times mentions: “ Lefty Canadians have no idea who’s at the G7! It’s NOT THE ‘G8’ for a reason, dopey. Putin isn’t even there! Boy, you’re one of those ‘easily manipulated’ that Hillary talked about. Get off the #FakeNews Lmao! https://t.co/nqwl7Z32C7.” Another example reads as follows: “.@TheOneJohnWard ‘does’ #Trudeau, Canada and the whole #MSM which is, of course, very #FakeNews https://t.co/vPzmZlfwam.”

Additional information

Funding

This study is funded by SSHRC, entitled “Fake News perceptions and discourses on social media and Canadian mainstream media,” grant number (430-2019-00100).