Ethnologia Europaea

How do users of social media platforms produce, shape and share truths online? In this introduction, we outline our understanding of digital truth-making as a process that builds on the affordances of digital infrastructures to entangle information with social, cultural and emotional dynamics in a way that co-constitutes beliefs and convictions about the world. The contributions to the special issue illuminate how different variations of this process can be illuminated with the help of digital ethnography and additional empirical methods. In doing so, they exemplify how digital anthropology can contribute to ongoing debates about populism and right-wing politics in “post-truth” digital societies.

This article investigates the truth-making practices of networks of antifeminist women on social media who identify as “traditional” or “trad” for short. Demonstrating how trad truth-making emerges in response both to the tensions inherent in right-wing nationalism and neoliberal postfeminism, it argues that the potential solution trad women pose depends on the ways they harness social media to limb public and private spaces and personal and political concerns. Paying particular attention to the entanglement of emotions and technical affordances, I use instances from my fieldwork in trad networks to frame their outreach as a form of truth management equally invested in carving out a space for their own (semi)public presence as in combatting the perceived dangers of feminism.

The Spanish legal framework inherited from the Franco dictatorship (1939‒75) and its recent development foster political dynamics that ordain it as an old regime of post-truth, where denialism of fascist history is the official truth. Through digital ethnography I demonstrate that this kind of post-truth is further amplified through digital platforms, although there is also room for countercultural practices of antifascist truth-making in Spanish digital media. The lack of freedom of speech and the ritualisation of political discussion can hinder democratic truth-making practices, but postmemory forms of engagement with digital media also offset the impact of denialist post-truth. The conclusion questions whether the democratic liminality of the Spanish public sphere online and offline provide a breeding ground for post-truth.

In recent years, the rise of digital populist and/or nationalist movement and the post-truth phenomenon have affected the political landscapes of many countries, including China. This article focuses on how pop-cultural practices and practices of political participation intertwine in the digital truth-making process of Chinese online “fandom nationalists”. Using over one year of ethnographic mixed-methods data analysis following relevant hashtags and chat groups, I illustrate the truth-making practices of these online users and their clear preference for information with ideological affinities. I argue that the social media affordances allow Chinese online fandom nationalists to create various forms of strong synergies between pop-/fandom-cultural and political practices that provide an ideal ground for the propagation of certain political truths while simultaneously suppressing/hiding the truths of others.

This article addresses markers of plausibility and felicity in Eurosceptic narratives on social media that are not based on facts but on sociocultural and contextual appropriateness. Appropriateness is understood here as the contextual fit for specific audiences which includes a range of social and situational factors involved in judgements about the conventionality and propriety of statements. I investigate the construction of appropriateness on Twitter, taking a narrative on the National Health Service in the context of Brexit as an example. I show how Eurosceptic narratives on social media become “truthy” and “sticky”, and how conditions of appropriateness are constructed on Twitter. I bring together approaches from narratology and digital anthropology to show how social media posts in political debate follow distinct evaluation criteria.

Based on an investigation of how everyday users participate in right-wing populist discourse on social media platforms, this article explores the emotional practices that shape and legitimise purported truths about the threat posed by Islam to the Western world. The article builds on the findings of an online ethnography of a right-wing community of users on Twitter. Drawing on a practice theory approach of emotions that considers the properties of social media platforms, we argue that right-wing populist claims to truth do not function in a linear way. The emotions mobilised in this context do not solely focus on rejection and exclusion. Rather, right-wing populist truth-making is a complex process in which emotional practices of inclusion and exclusion are interwoven.

Understanding social media discourses as conversations and interpreting them as such allows reconstructing the communicative function of alternative facts as a practical achievement making a difference in interactive sensemaking. Using the documentary method approach to conversation analysis for interpreting the doing of alternative facts in conversations on the Facebook pages of the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), this article shows: (1) doing alternative facts has to be understood in the context of identity performances which bracket questions of facticity; (2) doing alternative facts is part of an overarching conversational dynamic of “suspicious investigation” held together by a shared orientation toward un-truthing mainstream reality construction; (3) and this dynamic immunizes itself against critique via identity performance and identity misrecognition.

In this ethnographic snapshot, I reflect on the experience of the internal borders of Havana. I consider how these borders become internalised, impacting everyday lives and the movements of my research partners across the city. I focus on the marginalised citizens whose legal status and place of living make the borders especially apparent. My interest lies in how the internal borders are set up and embodied in the context of Cuba and reflected in everyday experiences. I use my encounter with Ramón to present the varied experiences of the border through two radically different positionalities: that of Cubans who migrated to Havana and myself as a foreigner being able to move freely through the city.