https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4664-7155
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ABSTRACT
The judicial decision to overturn the federal right to abortion in the United States has profoundly influenced women across the country. Relying on 2,230 individual stories and over 500 posts on Instagram by anti-abortion activists, we investigate their discourse around abortion produced in a specific cultural moment—that of post-Roe America and a post-truth online society in which disinformation and conspiracy spread rampantly. This combined moment is particularly relevant given that people who can get pregnant are being marginalized and criminalized in American society at the same time that trust in experts and institutions is declining, thus troubling both institutional and feminist knowledge-production. Conceptually we draw on existing studies on embodied, feminist knowledge, intersectionality, populist expertise and conspiracy-believing, as well as gendered disinformation and conspiracy to show how (a) anti-abortion rhetoric devolves not only into disinformation but also conspiracy theories that are common among the alt-right and conservative online networks; (b) that the feedback loop among these communities is strong, and (c) that the anti-abortion movement on Instagram is experimenting with Gen Z rhetoric. We introduce and demonstrate the concept of embodied propaganda to capture the phenomenon of co-opting the experiences of marginalized groups in society to manipulate public opinion.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their contributions to this work. This study is a project of the Center for Media Engagement (CME) at the Moody College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin, where research is supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Omidyar Network, Open Society Foundations, as well as the Miami Foundation.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. The alt-right, according to both the Southern Poverty Law Center and experts on the group, is an extremist, white supremacist movement that is distinct from American conservativism but associated with the former president Donald J. Trump (“Alt-Right,” Citationn.d.; George Hawley Citation2017; Angela Nagle Citation2017). They skew younger rather than older, ascribe to such tenets as anti-feminism, individualism, “traditional values,” and tend to be hyper-online (“Alt-Right,” Citationn.d.; Hawley Citation2017; Nagle Citation2017).
2. Disinformation differs from misinformation in intent—while both are false, disinformation is propagated with the intent to deceive, while misinformation is not (Caroline Jack Citation2017; Marwick and Lewis Citation2017).
3. Following propaganda scholars (Jacques Ellul Citation2021; Woolley Citation2023), we define propaganda as that which aims to manipulate the opinion of its recipient. This is not necessarily always used for anti-democratic purposes, though in the context of this study, it is.
4. Founder of the international NGO the World Economic Forum.
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Notes on contributors
Zelly Martin
Zelly Martin (M.A. University of Texas at Austin) is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Journalism and Media at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) and a graduate research assistant at the Propaganda Research Lab at the Center for Media Engagement.
Inga K. Trauthig
Inga K. Trauthig (Ph.D. King’s College London) is the head of research of the Propaganda Research Lab at UT Austin’s Center for Media Engagement.
Samuel C. Woolley
Samuel C. Woolley (Ph.D. University of Washington) is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Media and fellow of the R.P. Doherty, Sr. Centennial Professorship at the Moody College of Communication at UT Austin. He is the program director of the Propaganda Research Lab and Knight faculty fellow at the Center for Media Engagement.