Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The enforced demise of Clyde Miller’s Institute for Propaganda Analysis—shuttered in 1942 amid accusations of communist sympathy and insufficient loyalty to the American ideal—resonates with coordinated campaigns to silence disinformation researchers today. This essay interrogates those campaigns, with a particular focus on Brazil. It begins by situating disinformation research within a matrix of democracy and autocracy, arguing that under current conditions, disinformation researchers function as an extension of civil society positioned against autocratic creep. Against that backdrop, the essay poses a central question derived from Arundhati Roy’s open-ended observation about the resemblances of authoritarian politics: do campaigns to silence disinformation researchers follow a playbook or do they spread via osmosis, as similar repertoires converge across structurally comparable authoritarian contexts? Tracing these dynamics across the US, the Philippines, Thailand, and India, the essay culminates in a granular account of how NetLab—a social media observatory at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro—experienced a campaign to discredit and shutter its research on disinformation and social media regulation. It concludes that amid constricting space for critical expression, disinformation research continues to speak democratic resistance to those who would see it undone and should be protected on that basis.
Source: Journalism History
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7202279264