Information Styles and Political Engagement: Navigating Misinformation in Hybrid Media Environments during German Populist Mobilizations
Recent advances in STS-affine Cultural Sociology research suggests treating misinformation uptake as “alternative epistemologies,” proposing that different groups operate with distinct, often conflicting, understandings of truth, knowledge, and evidence. While acknowledging variation in media users' sense-making is certainly valuable, this approach also faces challenges. First, research tends to take alternative media users’ claims at face value, equating political mobilizations' use of scientific language with actual knowledge production. Second, like studies within the “misinformation paradigm,” the “alternative epistemologies” approach often views media rather instrumentally, treating digital communication's permeability as central mechanism for fringe beliefs to enter mainstream discourse.
In this paper, I argue for an approach to misinformation that focusses on media experience. I analyze data from repeated interviews with users with 54 alternative media users/activists and fieldwork conducted between 2019 and 2022, during the German mobilizations for German far-right populist party AfD and Querdenken (anti-lockdown protests). In the analysis, I note significant differences in how these media users/activists navigate the hybrid information environment. Drawing from the conceptual toolkit of media anthropology, I theorize these differences as “information styles” and argue that these distinct understandings and practices of information also imply different conceptions of the political and of (possible) political engagement. Building on this, I show how the adoption of a particular information style – I identify four – influences how users/activists move in and out of a sequence of populist mobilizations, why they participate in protests, but also how, in some cases, they depoliticize themselves again.