Guarding information’s Other: Theorising beyond information and communications technologies for disinformation

Plato’s fear of the possible manipulation of truth within the process of representation is as well-known as his corresponding arguments for the need of guardianship over the flow of information from professionals to fthe public. Increase in the scale and scope of participation afforded by new information and communication technologies (ICTs) have not been the promised gateway technology, seducing people and governments alike to democracy, but have increasingly become the target of democratic critique. If Plato’s allegory occurred within a torchlit cave, the dizzying expanse of technical change has not superseded his basic concerns: Developments in print news media, the radio, and digital media among newer ICTs have perennially reignited debates over information troubles.

While disappointment with ICTs is far from novel, current concerns over information betray the earlier exuberance of ICTs for democracy. As Wardle (2019: 6) wrote:

The promise of the digital age encouraged us to believe that only positive changes would come when we lived in hyper-connected communities able to access any information we needed with a click or a swipe. But this idealised vision has been swiftly replaced by a recognition that our information ecosystem is now dangerously polluted and is dividing rather than connecting us.

The tragedy of the democratic promise of ICTs has sometimes taken on an almost comedic lamentation. For a recent example, in a report on the history of ICT-led disinformation (Posetti & Matthews, 2018), one of the first so-called culprits analysed in its abridged history is the Gutenberg press, which the report described solely as radically increasing the capacity for mass deception. As the report explained, invented in the 1400s, the printing press “dramatically amplified the dissemination of disinformation and misinformation, and it ultimately delivered the first-large scale news hoax – ‘The Great Moon Hoax’ of 1835” (Posetti & Matthews, 2018: 1). So much for ICTs for democracy. As Feenberg (2017) argued, it is long past due for more practical and tempered approaches to the promise and problems of ICTs. One entry point into these larger debates is how to conceptualise information trouble.

Contemporary concerns over information trouble – from commercial information manipulation, news balance values in the face of corporate climate change scepticism, political disinformation in election campaigns, viral contagion from misinformed vaccine-hesitancy, propaganda in the war in Ukraine, and the like – can be understood as being embodied in recent UNESCO publications on methods for ICT decontamination (Allan et al., 2017) and World Health Organization (2020) conferences on infodemiology, in which the language of medical contagion is applied to the viral spread of troubled information on ICTs. In this context, McNair (2018: 5) saw a bitter irony in some long-time critics of mainstream news media, who vigorously defended “the likes of the New York Times” against campaigns “to define them as sick, dishonest, pro-elite, anti-working people purveyors of ‘fake news’”.

In the above context, a variety of labels have been proposed to measure and intervene in this social problem. Unlike Shakespeare’s rose, whereby any other name would smell just as sweet, some argue that the conceptual language used for information trouble contains assumptions on “how information spreads, who spreads it, and who receives it” but also shapes the “kinds of interventions or solutions [that] seem desirable, appropriate, or even possible” (Jack, 2017: 1). Concerns over the lack of clarity over older and more recent neologisms to conceptualise information trouble – propaganda, public diplomacy, disinformation, misinformation, fake news, and adjacent terms – have led to calls for definitional rigour (Jayakumar et al., 2021; Wardle & Derakshan, 2017).

In the context of the above situation, I argue for the need of an analytical meta-classification for contested information. An analysis of different case studies of information trouble drawn from the history of American communication highlights the need for a term that is able to account for a range of informational issues. As an analyst, the appreciation of the social and human finitude need not necessarily lead to a relativist equality between judgements, but it can allow for an appreciation of a context-based objectivity (see Feenberg, 2017; Hackett & Zhao, 1998). The proposed meta-classification encapsulated by information’s Other does not attempt to promote a specific diagnostic or measure to show when information is troubled and when it is untroubled (an approach found in the case studies below), but instead opens an analytical space to examine contestation over information as a process by which what counts as information, and not, is enacted. This framework opens an analytical space to critically engage this context-based objectivity.

The cases situate key theoretical issues for approaches to information by rooting them in their sociohistorical contexts. Drawing from discussions within the sociology of knowledge and objectivity in news, in this article, I argue for a conceptualisation of information’s Other to help frame contestations over information as a process, with the aim of accounting not only for falsehoods in information, but also political and cultural contestation over the selection and representation of information, to questions of informational omission and speculation. Developing an analytical category to understand contexts whereby information is othered, this framework distances itself from other conceptions of information trouble (as highlighted in this article) that may ignore possible political or cultural determinants of information and that may overlook concerns of the political economy of access to the production and dissemination of information and informational omission as the result of strategy or structural considerations. Taken together, these issues account not only for today’s alleged information disorder but also bring into focus concerns with information order.

The sociology of knowledge provides a grammar with which to engage the above.¹ As Cicourel (1964: 7) wrote, “measurement scales of any science can be viewed as a problem in the sociology of knowledge”. The measurement of where and how information becomes troubled may be considered one such scale. In D. Schiller’s (1988) poignant critique, conceptualisations of information and corresponding informational theories are subject to the sociohistorical contexts in which they are embedded. As much as conceptualisations of objective or non-partisan information is the emblem of American journalism (Schudson, 1978; in D. Schiller’s analysis from 1981, objectivity norms within the American press emerged in part through the desire to reach the widest quantity of paying consumers), where norms guide journalists to report only the facts and not values (Schudson, 2001), narrowing the focus of this approach to objectivity creates “concrete disparities in the access which it affords to different social actors [where a] language of public fact, news exists also as an idiom of private power” (D. Schiller, 1980: 21). These can be seen in the use of a wide range of allegedly descriptive concepts such as “experience” instead of “labour” (D. Schiller, 1996: 31), or “information”, “transmitters”, and “recipients” instead of otherwise political concepts such as “propaganda” and “class” (Zhao & Chen, 2022; terms translated). These stakes become clearer in cases where news stories come from accredited spokespersons, such as politicians, police, public relations, and the like, and therefore where institutional power becomes the primary information sources for journalists (see Fishman, 1980; Hall et al., 1978).

Mannheim’s (1936) Ideology and Utopia was written during an era of political polarisation. He understood this polarisation as threatening the required common ground necessary for discussion within a society. Mannheim argued that intellectuals could attain an objective vantage point by being reflexive on the relationism between the sociohistorical context of ideology and society and could soothe social conflicts emerging from the diversity of ideas.² As much as Mannheim tried to remove himself from an approach to objectivity as providing unfiltered access to facts, his argument for a professional intelligentsia parallels approaches to professional journalists as “detached observers [able to] stand apart from the real-world events and transfer the truth or meaning of those events to the news audience by employing neutral language and professionally competent reporting techniques, such as the standardized story format” (Hackett & Zhao, 1998: 111). However, unlike narratives of journalists within this tradition who see themselves as reporting on the world, Mannheim differentiated between informational supports of a world order, which he called ideology, and that which supplants a given order, which he called utopia.³ In this article, I deploy this approach to information in order to move away from apolitical and ahistorical approaches that narrow information’s scope to its truth or falsehood, which is achieved by shedding light on the sociohistorically constituted political economy of unequal access to the creation and distribution of information, and also examining cases that highlight the cultural and political determinants of information. Together, they represent cases where information cannot necessarily be confirmed or fact-checked, let alone verified along the coordinates of a detached objectivity.

Untethering definitions of objectivity from its embedded sociohistorical contexts is untenable. Hackett and Zhao (1998: 89) argued that news “objectivity and its components such as fairness and balance are vague concepts, and contending social groups negotiate and contest their meanings and application”, which allows for different interest groups to “exploit the polysemic character of objectivity” (consider how one American official stated that the Pentagon’s Gulf War media strategy was aimed to obtain “favorable objectivity”, as cited in Hackett & Zhao, 1998: 89). Hackett and Zhao (1998: 89) further argued that “the very designation of a ‘fact’ – the selection and definition of a phenomenon significant and worthy of attention – depends on pre-decided priorities and premises” (it is worth recalling how the value of news balance, and subsequent selection of representative information in news, inadvertently played in to promoting climate-change scepticism; see Boykoff & Boykoff, 2004).Within this framework, the delimitation between fact and fiction, and information and its Other, is a matter of contextual interpretation. However, this does not necessitate that all interpretations are equal: Values and judgement matter and can be used to elucidate a context-specific objectivity (Feenberg, 2017). Context-specific objectivity may also be beneficial in acknowledging the potential positive value in troubled information, with some approaches to social critique (Marcuse, 1969) or simply justificatory change (Kuhn, 1962/1970) hedging their place beyond the confines of a given knowledge regime.

The cultural and political inputs for deviant and descriptive labels, however rigorous, are well-known (Becker, 1966; Sacks, 1963), and the need for reflection on their sociohistorical context become all the more poignant for a field in which theoretical development in the US was constituted primarily by political, military, and commercial interests (Hardt, 1992; D. Schiller, 1996; Simpson, 1994), while the American communication system and its international reach itself was being practically constituted through dynamic processes of critique and co-option (see D. Schiller, 2023). As much as discrepancy from the rhythm of everyday life has been highlighted as a hallmark of newsworthiness (Shoemaker & Cohen, 2006), the communication field’s sustained concerns with social stability calls for reflexivity before seeking the professional heights in delimitating information from its Other. Recognising the mutual constitution of social objectivity and professionalism (Carey, 1969), social scientists should not repeat the mantra, paraphrasing McNair’s (1991/2006) review of Cold War scepticism of Soviet news media, that what we do is objectively professionalism, and what they do is objectively propaganda (see Al-Rawi et al., 2023).

A method within the sociology of knowledge is historical analysis. Mannheim (1936) argued that in order to understand modes of thought, one requires looking at the historical contexts in which they emerged in case studies. As Simon (1991: 128) argued:

[If] we are concerned about the imprecision of case studies as research data, we can console ourselves by noting that a man named Darwin was able to write about a study of the Galapagos Islands and a few other cases [without] statistics.

This article does not seek the origins of information, or even its evolution as a concept,⁴ but instead I hope that an analysis of approaches to information, situated within their historical and institutional contexts, will be beneficial in developing an adequate theory in light of the perceived informational troubles today. Such a meta-categorisation would cast a wide enough analytical frame to account for wider contexts of information, such as the unequal constitution of information and objectivity, while retaining the capacity for utopia at the heart of social critique. In so doing, I hope to account not only for bad information, but also accentuate the need to preserve the capacity to critique so-called good information.

Since the beginning of communication studies in the US, demarcating pedagogy and propaganda has been a theoretical and practical matter of concern. Some have defined propaganda as having a positive pedagogical function in society. Within the American variant of this tradition, propaganda was understood in neutral and even positive terms as necessary for public relations (Bernays, 1933), to even being the science of democracy itself (Smith, 1941). Generally, in these narratives, professional guidance for how the public should be informed – reduced to easily understood stereotypes – was presented as the way to guide an ever-complex society away from otherwise unnecessary unrest (Lippmann, 1922). These narratives came in the context of pronounced anxieties about strong media on malleable subjects with, as Garber (1942: 241) wrote, scholars focusing on unlocking “the secret of secrets, hitherto locked with Merlin in his tree, will emerge: the formula for controlling mankind”. Hadley Cantril’s (1940) account of social panic in reaction to George Orwell’s radio programme about a fake invasion from Mars is emblematic of these concerns.

At the institutional level, the belief that if information-makers could divest themselves from their reliance on political and commercial interests, could be seen in arguments to institutionalise “organized intelligence” (D. Schiller, 1996: 25). As one proponent claimed, in “place of socialism”, which only represented some interests, “organized intelligence” could “put out the right sense of the word, the socialist newspaper – the organ of the whole” (as cited in D. Schiller, 1996: 25). That is, by taking the objective high ground, the commercial press could remove themselves from communist criticism that they were media organs of capitalism. As Mannheim (1936) reminded us, however, the ideological move par excellence is othering a competing view as ideological, with appeals to objectivity, regardless of actual veracity, can be understood as a rhetorical strategy to ward off potential criticism of distortion or politics (Tuchman, 1972). This notion can be seen embodied in Shramm’s (1955b, 1955a) analysis of British and Soviet propaganda during World War II, which concluded that the Soviets were overt in their use of rhetoric and promotion of working-class concerns, while the British maintained the appearance of otherwise disinterested objectivity.

Conversely, others actively discredited propaganda and were concerned with the reach and nefarious use of these communication programmes in society. Far from being simply a concern with international actors, some progressive scholars considered propaganda to be a term for misleading and manipulative communications found within the state. Without illusions of American freedom of the press and the marketplace of ideas, Ickes (1939) aptly titled book, America’s House of Lords, condemned the dependence of national news providers on commercial interests. However, far from being the purview of progressive scholars alone, the analysis of propaganda in the early twentieth-century US was a feature of both left- and right-wing criticism, whereby both state- and market-led media became subject of propaganda content analysis in the political context of a faceoff between the Roosevelt administration and the commercial presses (D. Schiller, 1996).

Some scholars organised their concerns in the formation of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA). The IPA (1937–1942) was a US-based organisation that included a mix of academics, opinion leaders, and journalists that was created in response to fears over the role of propaganda in decreasing critical thinking (of the many leading academics, the famed communication scholar Hadley Cantril was president of the organisation at the moment of its creation). The IPA’s purpose was to guide the public to engage in well-informed rational discussions on current issues. As evidenced in a New York Times (1937) article “Group is Formed for Analysis of Methods by which Public Opinion is Influenced”, the organisation aimed “to assist the public in detecting and analyzing propaganda by conducting scientific research and education in the methods by which public opinion is influenced” and thus teach people how to think rather than what to think.

The IPA focused on domestic propaganda issues that might become possible threats to democratic ways of life. Using this definition, the constant concern with information management is evident in the sheer number of organisations and corresponding large budgets and is a reflection of the importance that the different agencies within the American government have with regards to the control of information (see Simonis, 2011). The IPA provided a definition of propaganda as the scope of its study. As quoted in a New York Times (1937: 15) article, they defined propaganda as “the expression of opinion or action by individuals or groups deliberately designed to influence opinions or actions of other individuals or groups with reference to predetermined ends”.

The IPA, as well as its definition of propaganda and scope of study, were criticised at the time. Ironic for an institution focusing attention on rhetoric instead of political economic structure, the IPA suspended its operations in order to preserve national unity, and many of its members transitioned to war communication work. Garber (1942) criticised the movement for having fostered “cheap skepticism” and undermining holistic reasoning and the place of value judgement in analysis. Riegel (1935) voiced similar concerns over the spread of what he described as “propagantitis”, with those infected no longer judging information on its own merit but instead seeing political manipulation in all communication. Garber (1942: 240) questioned the IPA’s definition of propaganda:

Was there not something fallacious in the Institute’s definition of propaganda, in that it made no distinction between truth and falsity, between good and evil, butabelledd as propaganda everything which is “the expression of opinion or action by individuals or groups deliberately designed to influence opinions or actions of other individuals or groups with reference to predetermined ends”?

Garber also explored the IPA’s focus on the “use of certain verbal tricks, such as distortion, suppression of relevant facts, and the use of ad hominem arguments”, rather than examining the “message in terms of its setting, its varied implications, the whole interacting system of complex relationships which gave it birth” (1942: 243). With relativist inclinations, the IPA inadvertently ignored differentiating between truth and falsehood and reduced all informational conflicts to rhetorical tricks discoverable by analysis.

The IPA ignored the importance of truth and values, and with it, how the rhetoric of dispassionate objectivity could also play into propaganda. This takes on highlighted importance today when claims over facts and reason over feelings and ideology are sometimes weaponised politically (Hong, 2021). A more analytically equipped descriptive term would be able to highlight any case in which information is contested without reducing the problem to the presence or absence of rhetoric. This need becomes all the more apparent for the IPA which, while focused on rhetorical rather than structural analysis, closed down because of the realpolitik of national unity during international war.

It is worth recalling that some developments in terminology within the field emerged more through needs of practical obfuscation and political positioning than anything pretending to be professionalism or objectivity. The term public diplomacy, for example, emerged in the mid-twentieth century from an American official wishing to seek distance from the use of the term propaganda, which was associated with foreign opponents (Cull, 2010). Zooming into the development of the US, the long-standing interplay between watchdogs and ever-changing departments and budgets has resulted in complex technical language for what might otherwise be described simply as information manipulation. The deep concern over the legality of the practice – differentiating information provided in public diplomacy and disinformation provided by propaganda – can be understood as being a primary reason for what can be described as an alphabet soup approach to information operations to both receive state funding and evade oversight.

Early decisions in the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) “illustrate the extent to which U.S. psychological warfare has had, from its inception, multiple, overlapping layers of cover stories, deceits, and euphemistic explanations even within the secret councils of government” (Simpson, 1994: 37). For example, in the same year, the CIA received both a quasi-public and a secret mandate to pursue psychological warfare (National Security Council, 1947a, 1947b), with developments of terms like psychological warfare and information operations used to evade congressional approval for what might otherwise have been understood as acts of war. Moreover, conflicting institutional developments obfuscated operational intentions (Simpson, 1994), while state and commercial organisations led the call for an international free-flow of information. With the free-flow argument being a question of state-led foreign policy as much as a corporate-led contest for the information market, then United States Assistant Secretary of State William Benton said in January 1946:

[The] State Department plans to do everything within its power along political or diplomatic lines to help break down the artificial barriers to the expansion of private American news agencies, magazines, motion pictures and other media of communications throughout the world […]. Freedom of the press – and freedom of exchange of information generally – is an integral part of our foreign policy. (As cited in Gauha, 1979: 54)

Public and congressional concerns and suspicions of the effectiveness of propaganda, among other factors, led to the creation of talks on public diplomacy and the institutionalisation of the United States Information Agency (USIA) in 1953 (Simonis, 2011). At its inception, the USIA was created to influence the world through a range of media products in order to support American goals and supplant support for perceived enemies. At its service, magazines, television spots, and radio, among other media, were used to export American interests to foreign countries. If more traditional terms like war communication, psychological manipulation, or propaganda were unpopular in congress, the seemingly descriptive and neutral term information can be interpreted as a communication strategy, with one of the founding USIA texts defining its mission as being “to further the national interest by improving United States relations with other countries and people through the broadest possible sharing of ideas, information, and educational and cultural activities” (U.S. Government, n.d.). As much as we may be tempted to limit discussions of information trouble to the usual suspects, it is worth recalling that the sharing of otherwise accurate information can also be considered problematic.

The information produced by mostly Western creators and distributors at the time were received in a deeply uneven global terrain. This imbalance cannot be overstated. For example, in the 1970s, television media flows were remarkably a “one-way street” between capitalist and ever-developing countries (Nordenstreng & Varis, 1974), with information flowing to and from centres of capitalism (H. Schiller, 1978, 1981). It is difficult to conceive of these informational flows outside of the material conditions, conduits, and carriers that have historically structured the uneven access to the creation, circulation, and reception of communication (Mattelart, 1994). Unequitable relations in the production and distribution of information (Golding & Murdock, 1978; Mattelart, 1976) to uneven participation in the design, development, and deployment of the communication technologies that carry information (see Feenberg, 2002; Mattelart, 2000) have long been criticised as harbingers for communication, cultural, political, and technological dependencies (Dos Santos, 1970; Smythe, 1981). In such a context, the so-called free flow of information, far from being trouble-free, can be understood as the theoretical lubricant for capitalist expansion (see H. Schiller, 1969).

Unlike former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Mark Fowler’s famous remark that a television was just a “toaster with pictures”, in which communication products function best when left to the market, information is not simply a commodity transferred between users, but it also functions as an embodiment of social values and community (Carey, 2008). Consider the statement of the former USIA Director of TV and Film Service:

The U.S. government ran a full-service public relations organization, the largest in the world, about the size of the twenty biggest U.S. commercial PR firms combined [with] full-time professional staff of more than 10,000, spread out among some 150 countries, burnished America’s image and trashed the Soviet Union 2,500 hours a week with a “tower of babble” comprised of more than 70 languages, to the tune of over $2 billion per year. (Snyder, 2012: xi)

While the (de)merits of the dependency hypothesis is beyond the parameters of this article, this remark brings into context the question of how informational issues, far from being simply a question of their accuracy or falseness, can be problematised in relation to broader social structures. The problem with the free flow of information is precisely that it decentres the centrality of conflict beyond simple barriers to information. In this way, the free-flow promise of inclusivity veils deep contradictions (Winseck, 1997) as to who, after all, would want to trouble so-called free information? While these media products may support cultural and political values (this has been argued at great length from a wide range of perspectives; see Dorffman & Mattelart, 1975; Herman & Chomsky, 2002; Leiss et al., 1990), inequalities in access to the production and dissemination of information problematise the state of information. These concerns are perhaps best embodied in the historic calls for a New World Information and Communication Order, or NWICO (see MacBride, 1980; Nordenstreng, 1984).

Here again, the benefits of a meta-descriptive term could help to conceptualise information contestation. The problem with the free flow of information doctrine for the likes of NWICO, as it emerged in actual practice, was not simply about objectivity or the presence or absence of rhetoric in the information provided, but how information circulated within a widely unequal context. Taking the free-flow doctrine at face value would leave unchallenged a conceptual coup by bracketing the political economic structural inequalities in the underlying capacity to produce and disseminate information in the first place. In the context of USIA and NWICO, it is evident how different actors attempted to frame not just the flow, but also the conceptualisation of information: For some it was simply a thing, just like an innocuous toaster, while for others, it also embodied cultural and political values.

The term information disorder emerged from concerns about the use of the term fake news. When then American presidential candidate Donald Trump began accusing traditional news media of being what he described as fake news, this accusation rearranged the traditional targets of some academic criticism. For Wardle, the term fake news has been captured by political actors and should not be used as a category of analysis (Wardle’s pivot away from traditional academic settings and towards FirstDraft, in order to speak to journalists and the general public, in many ways mimics the IPA turning away from the university and towards the general public; see Lee, 1952). Part of Wardle’s rejection of the term fake news is that “much of the content being debated isn’t actually fake, but instead used out of context or manipulated”, and he proposed that the “ecosystem of polluted information extends far beyond content that mimics ‘news’” (Wardle, 2018b: 951–952). Furthermore, according to Wardle (2018b: 951–952):

[The term has been] appropriated by politicians and their supporters around the world to describe news organizations they don’t like [and] has become a tool that the powerful use both to clamp down on and restrict free speech and to undermine and circumvent the free press.

As she continued, while fake news is simple, the ecosystem the term attempts to capture is complex. One of the term’s many problems is that “it focuses the conversation on text rather than on visuals, on websites rather than native posts on social networks or closed messaging apps” (Wardle, 2018b: 952; this concern recalls criticism of the IPA’s focus on propaganda messages as being sufficient for understanding propaganda in society).

In contrast, Wardle and Derakshan (2017: 5) provided a definition of what they call information disorder that has gained traction in policy-making and academic circles. In their seminal report, Wardle and Derakshan (2017) defined the term as having three key categorical dimensions (misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation), phases (agent, message, interpreter), and elements (creation, production, and distribution). This taxonomy does not flatten all cases to one term, as in the IPA’s definition. Wardle and Derakshan also did not argue for a free flow of information as the solution to information trouble, but instead outlined a set of concerns and possible interventions. Unlike approaches by the IPA, as outlined in this article, Wardle and Derakshan (2017) drew on James Carey’s (2008) ritual view of communication as not simply providing information between transmitters and receivers, but also values for a sense of community. However, they only stressed the negative connotations of this approach, highlighting how Carey’s insight “helps us explain why echo chambers are so appealing [as they] provide safe spaces for sharing beliefs and worldviews with others, with little fear of confrontation or division” (Wardle & Derakshan, 2017: 50). Beyond this disorder, they did not account for how Carey’s argument could also be used to understand informational orders implied at the heart of their demands.

Consider for a moment some of the key attributes of information disorder in society that Wardle and Derakshan highlighted. Among these, they highlighted cases when information does not adequately represent the facts. Making surface-level diagnostics and ignoring questions of cultural and political inputs in information, they did not describe how and when information makes false connections. The question of accurate representations is difficult because one must evaluate the values of not only what is present, but also what is absent. As Borges (1946/1999) aptly showed in a thought experiment, a map that purports to accurately represents the world without omission would necessarily be concomitant with the actual world it represents: A one-to-one representational ratio is useless. Values, then, necessarily play into the selection of information, with the question of what adequately represents the facts being one of the major fields by which cultural and political contestation can occur. (Consider, for example, the creation of the Office of Special Plans that played a key role in creating information linking Iraq and the then recent 9/11 attacks in New York, and which helped provide now known to be false information that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; see Al-Rawi, 2012).

A similar criticism can be made of Wardle’s (2018a) related glossary, which features “the most frequently used and commonly misunderstood words, acronyms, and phrases that relate to information disorder”. Perhaps most surprisingly, there is no entry for “information”. It could be argued that the most frequently and commonly misunderstood word – or at the very least one whose determinants are constantly othered in contestation as shown in this article – is “information” itself. As Mannheim (1936: xvii) wrote:

[Since] every assertion of a “fact” about the social world touches the interests of some individual or group, one cannot even call attention to the existence of certain “facts” without courting the objections of those whose very raison d’etre in society rests upon a divergent interpretation of the “factual situation”.

By focusing on surface-level representativeness, rather than the judgment and values that underwrite them, political and cultural questions are pushed to the side.

Another example of this dynamic in Wardle’s account can be found in the issue of cultural facts. Here again, the question of value judgement disappears in a narrowed discussion of reasoning. Consider McNair’s (2018: 46–47) argument in Fake News, where he writes that when “even some respected scientists espouse a belief in God and the supernatural – beliefs which entirely contradict their scientific knowledge – one can hardly be too critical of a Creationist in Alabama or a Mormon in Salt Lake City”. However, what do we learn of the range of experience, and how do we limit social inquiry, if we simply claim, for example, that “Augustine [was] in error, then, when he called upon God on every page of the Confessions?” (Wittgenstein, 1931/1993: 119). Or, to put it in the language of this article, describing the Christian Good News as a multimillennial equivalent to today’s fake news is not a value-free judgement. Moving away from a binary question of either objectivity or distortion, and information or misinformation, such claims are more adequately accounted for when understood as a process of othering of information along cultural inputs. In such cases, we see the import of a meta-conceptual term that casts a wide enough analytical frame to confront specific information conflicts and highlight, when required, possible contexts of their cultural and political underpinnings. In so doing, this highlights how Carey’s (2008) argument on the cultural and community import of communication is not only helpful for understanding enemies who peddle in the creation and consumption of “information disorder”, but it is also helpful for thinking about how different actors accomplish order more broadly in everyday life. In this context, the question of what precisely is disorderly about information disorder can be broached without othering cultural or political factors as simply erroneous or outright inaccurate.

In this article, I have proposed the descriptive term information’s Other to help make sense of difficulties with defining information trouble. The term can be used to refer to any case where the state of information is othered. By focusing on the process of othering, I suggest a move beyond the sometimes reductionist ahistorical approaches to information trouble. Such a term distances itself from other conceptions of information trouble, as highlighted in this article, that may take for granted the possibility of value-free information, ignore cultural or political inputs in informational objectivity, and bracket wider politics in unequal access to the creation and dissemination of information. At the same time, it hopes to keep open the possibility for radical critique: The point for much of social critique was never simply to describe the world, but also in fundamental ways to change it.

By having a meta-analytical framework to account for all forms of information and informational othering, the hope is to be able to account for the rich context-specific terrain in which information is othered by a variety of means. Rather than remain focused on the definitional minutia for the coordinates of troubled information, such a framework can bring into focus wider cultural and political determinants whereby disorderly and orderly information is created, circulated, and consumed. The need for such a framework becomes even more important when the actual objectivity of information may be of secondary importance in what Braman (2008) described as politics-driven evidence-averse environments. As much as it may also be deployed for reactionary ends, progress along the unfinished project of emancipation has come about to a certain extent from a refusal of given circumstances. The utopian refusal of a state of affairs, with demands of a liberated society and a corresponding new sensibility, is a basic premise for some approaches to social change. While Mannheim (1936: xvii) located all utopian thinking as “dangerous thought”, and therefore problematically made them all equal within a pluralist view of society, before rushing to decontaminate or rectify so-called information disorder, analysts might develop a discriminating (in)tolerance to not only locate the political and cultural contestations of information and informational omissions, but also to speculate on the emancipatory potential in the world to come.