Beyond Disinformation

Manchester members of the “(Mis)Translating Deceit” project team established the “Beyond Disinformation” research network together with our colleagues at the University of Toronto and the University of Melbourne. The project “Beyond Disinformation: Assessing Digital Communications Strategies of Hybrid Neo-Authoritarian Empires” received funding from the three universities involved. It aims to bring together faculty members, postdoctoral researchers, and PhD students from Manchester, Melbourne, and Toronto (MMT) for virtual and in-person research cluster events. The project is headed by Stephen Hutchings (University of Manchester), Dara Conduit (University of Melbourne), and Kenzie Burchell (University of Toronto).

More specifically, addressing major new international developments including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s embrace of foreign interference, the project aims to improve our understanding of the digital political communication strategies of emerging "hybrid neo-authoritarian empires", examining their impact on domestic, global, and diasporic audiences. We extend our transnational, methodological, and interdisciplinary expertise in collaboration with Melbourne and Toronto to explore two new crucial avenues: 1) emerging translingual digital governance techniques and technologies of neo-authoritarian empires; 2) transnational networks of nonstate actors and diaspora media audiences participating in the construction of repressive informational orders, a permanent consolidation of hybrid war globally. Through intensive scholarly exchanges, we are developing pioneering toolsets for comparatively studying Russia’s and China’s global activities with concerted focus on the European, MENA and Australasia regions.

Targeted at Early Career Researchers across all three institutions, the project involves several PhD workshop events and staff exchange visits, culminating in co-authored journal articles and a major new grant application aimed at further consolidation of our transnational partnership in this vital area of global policy challenges.

Deepening our collaboration with the University of Toronto in disinformation research, Vera Tolz and Kenzie Burchell (University of Toronto) are leading another collaborative project “Beyond Disinformation: The Strategic Techniques and Transnational Contours of Evolving Narrative and Diasporic Information Orders” (September 2024-September 2025). A larger project team includes Drs Jennifer Ross and Sherry Yu from the University of Toronto, Dr Dariya Orlova from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine, and postgraduate researchers from Manchester and Toronto.

The project is funded jointly through the Knowledge Synthesis grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and UK Research and Innovation’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (UKRI-AHRC).

The main aim of this project is critically to review the existing scholarship on how new technologies facilitate the emergence of new authoritarian techniques that seek to impose dominant "great power" narratives for the purpose of reinvigorating a militarized imperialism as the global status quo. To different degrees these techniques are used by actors affiliated not only with dictatorships, but also with democracies. The main project output – a report to be shared with academic and non-academic audiences – evaluates the findings of the existing research and the gaps which need to be filled. In our critical survey of the existing publications, we pay particular attention to the research on how the authoritarian techniques are used to suppress cultural diversity and marginalize local histories and diasporic voices. The report suggests the ways this research can be taken forward. Within the ‘Beyond Disinformation’ project, the participating PhD students are offered an opportunity to develop their research skills and to establish a forum for discussing their own research projects and sharing their findings. The ‘Beyond Disinformation’ project findings are shared with the following stakeholders outside academia: the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; the Canadian Journalists of Colour Network; IBM Research Europe; the Interactive Advertising Bureau (Europe’s digital advertising industry’s professional association), as well as individual journalists with whom team members have professional contacts.

The project team argues that when the right to participate in the crafting, circulation and negotiation of worldviews is precluded, we lose the value of evolving voices, cultures and histories in conversation with one another. These forms of subnational, transnational and diasporic engagement are urgently necessary for negotiating a transnational democratic foundation for collectively attending to the permacrisis that accompanies increasing technological disruption and the widening chasm of geopolitical conflict.