Book Review: Disinformation in the Global South by Herman Wasserman & Dani Madrid-Morales (Eds.)

Abstract

The book starts with a question that should haunt scholars from the North: if they had paid more attention to earlier disinformation campaigns already in course in the Global South, would it be possible to predict—and react better to—the later “infodemic” during the Covid-19 pandemic? Although this question is impossible to answer, Disinformation in the Global South gives us a better understanding of different cultures of disinformation and Southern perspectives on how to respond to this crisis. As much as disinformation campaigns mostly perform on the local stage, we are dealing with a global phenomenon and together with the many cases in the Global South can have a better picture of the problem and possible solutions. It is a plus that this book visits countries that usually are not in Political Communication journals and conferences. Herman Wasserman and Dani Madrid-Morales assembled a team of 27 scholars covering countries as diverse as Chile, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, and Turkey, dedicating also chapters to Arab societies and Southeast Asia. The main thesis throughout the book is that disinformation can only be properly understood within the social, political, economic, and historical contexts where it is consumed and spread. However, to produce context-specific research in a comparative approach, it is necessary to recognize a diverse range of individual experiences with disinformation, misinformation, falsehoods, rumors, and inaccurate information. Conventionally, the field has been delimitating misinformation as false information without intent to deceive, while disinformation deliberately misleads with biased information, manipulated facts, or propaganda. By giving a more ample use of the terms “disinformation” and “misinformation,” this book exposes the limitations of these distinctions and demonstrates it is naive to use a simple binary and moralistic classification between “disinformation,” as deliberate lying, compared to “misinformation,” with nonmalicious intentions. As much as this might upset some scholars willing to build a rigid field, a research agenda embracing the Global South and different contexts brings much more valuable contributions. One result of this approach is that Book Review