Ethnography in the Fake News Factory

What can production studies and the cultural studies of creative industries contribute to current debates in political communication and disinformation studies? What are the political tradeoffs to consider when we record the voices of fake news authors and position them as complicit workers rather than exceptional villains? This talk presents conceptual and methodological reflections from a three-year study of the political trolling industry in the Philippines with recent comparative research in Thailand. I argue that ethnographies of disinformation production open possibilities for the reparative critique of political marketing and influencer industries and local-level / bottom-up engagements with tech platforms.