*CFP* "DISINFORMATION-FOR-HIRE AND CLICK FARMING AROUND THE WORLD: IDENTITIES, INCENTIVES, INFRAESTRUCTURES", SPECIAL ISSUE, SOCIAL MEDIA + SOCIETY JOURNAL

From state-sponsored propagandists using paid troll armies, to commercially motivated data analytics firms selling their toolkits to politicians, and platform workers producing memes for overseas clients, the global industry of disinformation production has only professionalized and diversified. This special issue for Social Media + Society aims to deepen understanding about the social identities, work arrangements, and political and commercial motivations of an emerging class of digital disinformation workers. We are interested in critical and interdisciplinary research that examines the political economy, specifically the digital and creative industries that propel and produce disinformation. The special issue’s focus on business models and disinformation worker identities in global context aims to expand on disinformation studies’ analysis of “fake news” and hate speech as content that require better policing or fact-checking. It also aims to expand platform studies’ research agenda and consider the range of digital professionals and entrepreneurs who buy and sell engagement on social media–with pernicious political consequences especially in contexts where dissenting voices are suppressed.

Thus, we solicit submissions that discuss the diverse worker hierarchies and conditions, outsourced gig arrangements, money politics, and/or regulatory loopholes in the promotional industries that enable the strategic production of disinformation. We are interested in interdisciplinary and ethnographic research that engages with the deep stories of workers in “dark PR” firms (Silverman, Lytyvenko & Kung 2020; Verwey & Muir 2019), data analytics firms (Briant 2021), Latin American and Indonesian Instagram click farms (Lindquist 2021), and “propaganda secretary” offices (Hassan & Hitchen 2019). We are also interested in normative discussions about complicity and collusion in digital industries as well as scholarly self-reflection about the challenges of doing engaged research about disinformation (Ong 2020).

We are especially interested in submissions that shed light across these themes:

• ethnographic portraits of paid trolls, meme producers, and political strategists 
• precarity, aspiration, and the tactics of resistance of digital workers / disinformation producers 
• the ethics of representing perpetrators; whistleblowers as unreliable narrators 
• participatory disinformation (Starbird 2021) and networked disinformation 
• the infrastructure, materiality, and “platform trees” (van Dijck 2020) of click farm platforms with mainstream social media 
• moral justifications of disinformation producers (Ong & Cabañes 2019) 
• the complicity of advertising and public relations to “organized lying” (Edwards 2021) 
• legitimacy, respectability, and plausible deniability; the role of intermediaries or brokers in the disinformation industries 
• mental health of workers in digital shadow economies 
• the social proximities between content moderators and paid trolls in the global South 
• regulatory loopholes in political marketing and PR; experiments with self-regulation and codes of ethics in digital campaigning (Udupa 2019) 
• auto-ethnographic reflections of engaged scholars about their experiences working with governments, platforms, workers, and journalists to shed light on disinformation shadow economies

 

The special issue will include an interview with ProPublica's Craig Silverman and a response to the contributions from Dr Joan Donovan.

 

Timeline

300- to 500-word abstracts should be emailed to (rafaelgrohmann@unisinos.br) and (jcong@umass.edu) by October 15, 2021. The abstract should articulate: 1) the issue or research question to be discussed, 2) the methodological or critical framework used, and 3) the expected findings or conclusions. Feel free to consult with the Special Issue Editors about your article ideas and potential angles or approaches.

Decisions will be communicated to the authors by November 1, 2021. Full papers of the selected abstracts should be submitted by March 1, 2022.

There is no article processing fee for this special issue.