Suspicious stories: taking narrative seriously in disinformation research

Neil Sadler, 'Suspicious stories: taking narrative seriously in disinformation research', Communication Theory, 2025. 

Abstract: The concept of narrative has been widely employed in the disinformation literature. Nonetheless, its use has been dominated by loose intuitions of what narratives are and do alongside vague accounts of specific stories. Theorized more carefully, thinking in terms of narrative has much to offer disinformation studies by helping to better define what constitutes disinformation and providing sophisticated frameworks for assessing specific content. To enable a nuanced view of narrative truth, I propose a “hermeneutic realist” approach in which stories “disclose” wider realities rather than constructing or simply reflecting them, supplemented with Phelan’s “narrative ethics” to facilitate inquiry into how far stories are morally legitimate. I apply these ideas in a case study of Twitter content posted by a Venezuelan political influencer blaming Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine on NATO enlargement. In so doing, I show that content may be referentially and ethically problematic without necessarily being false. 

Link to the Online First Open Access version: https://academic.oup.com/ct/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ct/qtaf013/8195864#525188601