From Media Literacy to Media Empathy? Dealing with Reactionary Digital Cultures

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 is Robert Topinka, whose interest is in reactionary digital cultures in the ‘post-pandemic’ environment. He is also releasing a report on this work. Such reactionary politics in the context of COVID-19 largely involves the rejection of the general consensus, and a call to take control of your own body. This is linked with far-right body culture, and any debunking and criticism from the mainstream just ends up reinforcing the message.

Instead of tracking extremist content to label it as disinformation and debunk it, there is therefore a need to understand how people drift into these spaces, and to move from media literacy to a media empathy (but not sympathy) paradigm: we need to ask what attracts people to these ideas in the first place.

This is also because debunking is often reactive and slow, and doesn’t reach the right people; deplatforming has unintended consequences; and right-wing extremists utilise such debunking and deplatforming in support of their own rhetoric of resisting the oppressive mainstream. And indeed, UK Home Office research shows that radicalisation is now taking place not in well-known extremist communities (the far right, Islamists), but in communities with unclear and shifting beliefs.

Telegram has now clearly emerged as the platform for the deplatformed, too: there is a substantial pattern of forwarding recommendations between large-scale channels that are variously COVID-sceptic, anti-vaxx, and otherwise problematic. But celebrities like Russell Brand also play a substantial role in mainstreaming such perspectives, and when they get banned from YouTube and similar platforms they start to appear on more minor, more extremist channels, and are endorsed by far-right disinformation actors.