What Comes After "Disinformation"?

On May 25th 2022, media and communication scholars met at Sciences Po in Paris for a pre-conference before the annual conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) to discuss the question, “What comes after disinformation studies?”

As the pieces in this collection show, it may be time for disinformation studies to fade away—or become something new.

Chris Anderson and Théophile Lenoir note in their introductory essay,

“The problem is twofold. First, disinformation studies has generally lacked analyses of power and interest… Second, the real problem underlying informational politics in many countries are powerful groups seeking to hold on to their political, social, economic, and cultural advantages in the face of increasingly powerful challenges to that power.”

In this special issue of the Bulletin of Technology and Public Life, we offer 11 articles that take up the question of “what comes after disinformation studies” from many angles.

This issue is edited by Alice Marwick, Shannon McGregor, and Elaine Schnabel. It is based on the ICA pre-conference organized by Chris Anderson, Meredith Clark, Daniel Kreiss, Rachel Kuo, and Sylvain Parasie and hosted at the médialab at Sciences Po.