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Today, talking about ‘fake news’ or ‘alternative facts’ is not an extraordinary claim any more but seems to have become part of our political vocabulary. Fake news, mis- and disinformation is not only a problem of a particular country but is part of politics around the world. In this paper, Linda Monsees looks at how fake news and disinformation shape public debates and asks about the implications for democracy. This paper thereby goes beyond previous debates concerning epistemology and the novel character of fake news. Empirically, this paper explores dominant tropes of the disinformation debate in Germany, Czechia and the US. She will show how the tropes of media literacy, hybrid warfare and the power of social media prevail and actually hamper important democratic practices. Rather than fostering debate over important socio-political issues, a narrow focus on disinformation runs danger in focusing too much on technical and legal issues. Social forces such as the rise of authoritarian tendencies in society are thereby covered up.
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Speaker bio:
Linda is a researcher of international politics interested in security technology and the impact of technologised practices on democracy. Her research combines empirical analyses of phenomena, such as encryption or fake news, with conceptual work on core political ideas, such as the public or politicisation. She joined SPIR in January 2020 where she leads a project on “the public and cybersecurity”, funded by the Fritz-Thyssen Foundation in Germany. She is involved in the doingIPS research network, in light of her interest in rethinking political practices.
Before coming to London, Linda held positions as a post-doctoral researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt (Cluster of Excellence ‘Normative Orders’) and the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (Bochum, Germany). She received her PhD in 2017 from the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences, with a thesis on the politics of digital encryption. The thesis has evolved into a book manuscript and has been published with Routledge, as part of their New Security Series, under the title ‘Crypto-Politics: Encryption and Democratic Practices in the Digital Era’ (2020).
As part of her current project, Linda is investigating ‘fake news’ with a particular focus on its impact on democracy and the way public discourse presents fake news as a common threat to society; the first output of which is an article forthcoming in Critical Studies on Security.
She also regularly participates in public engagement projects, presenting her research and wider questions concerning digital technology and its impact on society.