Fakeness: Digital Inauthenticity and Emergent Political Tactics in Armenia
Tamar Shirinian · PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review · 2019
Abstract Fake news and fake social networking profiles have recently come under a great deal of public attention. Much of this attention has focused on the dangers of politics as a space in which inauthenticity is now running rampant. Through an ethnographic exploration of how LGBT activists and their right‐wing nationalist opposition make use of fake information and fake social networking profiles in Armenia, I argue that rather than dismissing fakeness as an aberration of politics, it might be regarded as an emergent political tactic within a new informational logic that has risen through, and in interruption of, digital communication. While actors on the right in Armenia and beyond have used forms of such inauthentic politics, fakeness has the potential to be used in multiple directions and for various other political causes.