Cross-National Agenda-Setting and the Global Spread of Misinformation

• In Event: Misinformation and Marginalization

Abstract

The mediated flows of misinformation exert significant political influence in western democracies. This influence is particularly acute in political conversations and policymaking processes that center on marginalized groups. However, while scholars have raised alarms about the widespread problem of political misinformation, prior studies have tended to focus on (1) misinformation regarding mainstream political and public health issues like election fraud and vaccination that are widely understood and acknowledged as false and (2) how misinformation flows through social and mass mediated networks within individual countries. Missing from the literature is a robust accounting of (1) what misinformation exists regarding political issues considered less “objective” by dominant political groups, like those related to marginalized groups that are less commonly understood and acknowledged as false, and (2) how misinformation flows between countries in the networked transnational public sphere. The present research project intervenes in this state of affairs, drawing on a large-scale content analysis of misinformation regarding transgender topics in the United States of America and the United Kingdom to investigate the nature and extent of mediated misinformation about transgender issues, the dynamics of attention to such misinformation across social and mass news media, and the transatlantic flows of misinformation between the US and UK.

The weaponization of misinformation to oppose transgender rights has increased acutely within the United States and the United Kingdom (and, arguably, globally) in recent years. Lawmakers in the US have proposed hundreds of bills targeting the transgender community—particularly transgender youth—grounded in widely known misinformation about gender-affirming care and retracted research about trans identities. Crucially, some scholars have argued that the parallel increases in transphobic policymaking in the US and UK are closely related, as far right actors in the US and TERF activists in the UK have coordinated efforts to create a transnational push to undo recent progress in transgender rights. As such, further academic research is necessary to understand the transnational flows of anti-transgender discourse and properly attend to the mobilizing role of misinformation (and disinformation) in policymaking and political conversations. Accordingly, the present article draws on research into cross-national intermedia agenda-setting to systematically analyze the nature and spread of misinformation about transgender issues across two national contexts. In doing so, it aims to disentangle transatlantic flows of misinformation and provide vital insight into the saliency of misinformation within both national contexts.

To achieve this aim, this article draws on data from a larger, mixed-methods project focused on anti-transgender misinformation that developed a validated content analysis codebook of misinformational claims relating to transgender topics. The present study applies the validated codebook to a dataset of claims about transgender topics in social media and mass news media in the US and UK. The dataset consists of data from three sources (1) CrowdTangle’s archive of public content from Facebook Pages; (2) Meta’s Ad Library of paid advertisements regarding issues, elections, or politics on Facebook; and (3) Media Cloud’s archive of online news media content from the US and UK between 1 January 2016 and 31 December 2022.

Our analyses of this data focus on comparing the prevalence and character of misinformation in the US and UK, as well as identifying causal relationships between the misinformation circulating in each country on the other. First, we compare the relative rates of misinformation overall, as well as different misinformation types in each country, identifying differences and similarities in the claims that dominate each national media environment. Second, we compare which categories of claimants are responsible for different types of misinformation in each country, revealing nation-specific patterns in who is given authority to speak disinformatively on transgender topics. Finally, we employ Granger causality tests to reveal directions of intermedia agenda-setting between the two countries, identifying when, and with regard to which types of misinformation, US and UK media reciprocally influence one another.

Taken together, our findings extend scholarly knowledge on the dynamics of global misinformation flow. Moreover, they illuminate the dynamics of mediated contest over transgender rights in the transnational networked public sphere, revealing the significant role of misinformation in public debate and identifying potential intervention points for the curbing of misinformation’s influence.

Authors

• Thomas J Billard, Northwestern University

• Nash Jenkins, Northwestern University

• Walker Brewer, Northwestern University

• Rachel Moran, University of Washington