As a consequence of the burgeoning awareness about the degree to which communication and information technologies transformed democratic deliberation, political struggles over disinformation ensued in a number of countries. This master’s Degree Project focuses on the politics of falsehood to answer the following question: to which degree does the theory on post-truth worlds (PTW) explain the main themes articulated by legislators and platform representatives at parliamentary hearings about disinformation in comparison to a MCD-inspired perspective defined as ICT3D? The theoretical framework explains the main concepts in PTW (Farkas & Shou, 2020) and ICT3D, which is defined by this DP as the contentious field concerning the mediation of collective affairs by the intersection of deliberation systems, data politics and development dimensions within and across societies worldwide. The empirical section presents a thematic content analysis of three study cases that are used to compare both approaches, consisting of 15 parliamentary inquiries of digital platforms in the United States, the United Kingdom and Brazil within the context of right-wing ruling between 2017 and 2020. The results confirm the relevance of PTW as an interpretative key to the meta-deliberation between legislators and platform representatives, but also identify many contents that either go beyond the scope of PTW or present nuances and tensions within PTW-related codes. The findings also provide a number of conclusions on the potential of ICT3D as a theoretical approach: the contentious intertwining of data politics, deliberative systems and development dimensions was demonstrated to be present in meta-deliberation; the wide array of development dimensions raised in all cases shows the pertinence of ICT3D to Comdev; and ICT3D has also proven to be of value in demonstrating the absence of certain themes and contents that should be expected in meta-deliberation from a critical perspective. The discussion elaborates on the explanatory potential and limits of PTW and ICT3D, concluding that they operate at different levels: PTW are specific discursive formations - among others - that articulate themes and contents about ICT3D.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:mau-45281 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Monteiro, Raero |
| Publisher | Malmö universitet, Institutionen för konst, kultur och kommunikation (K3) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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