Prophets and loss: how "soft facts" on social media influenced the Brexit campaign and social reactions to the murder of Jo Cox MP

This article examines “soft facts” about security issues in the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign. Soft facts arise when information provenance is uncertain, and are forms of malleable and contingent knowledge, such as rumors, conspiracy theories, and propaganda. There is a growing appreciation that digital communications environments are especially conducive to the dissemination of these kinds of information. Informed by empirical data comprising forty‐five thousand nine hundred and fifty‐seven data points collected by monitoring social media before and after the UK Brexit referendum campaign (June 16–October 12, 2016), the analysis examines how and why a series of soft facts concerning Brexit were mobilized. By developing the concept of “digital prophecy,” the article explores how influence is exerted by online prophets who were connecting current events to past grievances, to advance negative predictions about the future. This starts to capture the tradecraft of digital influencing, in ways that move beyond the structural topologies of communication networks. In policy terms, the analysis reminds us of the need to attend not just to how influence is achieved through fake news (e.g., using social media bots to amplify a message), but also why influence is sought in the first place

Cloaked websites: propaganda, cyber-racism and epistemology in the digital era

This article analyzes cloaked websites, which are sites published by individuals or groups who conceal authorship in order to disguise deliberately a hidden political agenda. Drawing on the insights of critical theory and the Frankfurt School, this article examines the way in which cloaked websites conceal a variety of political agendas from a range of perspectives. Of particular interest here are cloaked white supremacist sites that disguise cyber-racism. The use of cloaked websites to further political ends raises important questions about knowledge production and epistemology in the digital era. These cloaked sites emerge within a social and political context in which it is increasingly difficult to parse fact from propaganda, and this is a particularly pernicious feature when it comes to the cyber-racism of cloaked white supremacist sites. The article concludes by calling for the importance of critical, situated political thinking in the evaluation of cloaked websites