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Article published In:
Discourses of Fake News
Edited by Scott Wright
[Journal of Language and Politics 20:5] 2021
► pp. 696–718

Recursion theory and the ‘death tax’

Investigating a fake news discourse in the 2019 Australian election

ORCID logo | La Trobe University
ORCID logo | University of Texas at Austin
ORCID logo | University of Waikato

Since the 2016 US federal election, political actors have weaponized online fake news as a means of gaining electoral advantage (Egelhofer and Lecheler 2019). To advance understandings of the actors and methods involved in perpetuating fake news, this article focuses on an Australian story that circulated on and offline through different discourses during the 2019 federal election. We use content analyses of 100,000 media articles and eight million Facebook posts to trace false claims that the centre-left Labor party would introduce an inheritance tax dubbed a ‘death tax’ if it won office. To understand this evolution of ‘death tax’ discourse on and offline – and its weaponization by various actors – we draw from existing theorems of agenda setting, backfire effects, and propose our own recursion theory.

Keywords: fake news, death tax, Australian federal election, recursion theory, disinformation, misinformation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background and literature
    • 2.1Defining fake news
    • 2.2What is the death tax story?
    • 2.3Refutation and backfire effects
    • 2.4Agenda setting theory
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Content analysis of media stories and Facebook posts
  • 4.Data and findings
    • 4.1Frequency and spread of the death tax story
    • 4.2Key actors using terms
      • 4.2.1Politicians
      • 4.2.2Media organisations and online actors
    • 4.3Journalistic refutation and adjudication
    • 4.4Real versus fake discourses in media
    • 4.5Recursion of fake news discourses
      • 4.5.1First fake news discourse: Labor’s franking credit policies amount to a death tax
      • 4.5.2Second Discourse: Greens support a death tax
      • 4.5.3Third discourse: Labor-Green alliance
      • 4.5.4Fourth discourse: Labor will implement a death tax
      • 4.5.5Fifth Discourse: Labor lost election because of the death tax
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 July 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.21030.car
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Wright, Scott
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