Professor Jonathan Ong has written (with Rafael Grohman) a new introduction to a special issue of Social Media + Society entitled “Disinformation-for-Hire as Everyday Digital Labor”. This essay discusses how digital labor studies need to engage more directly with the ways disinformation thrives in the gray in-betweens of formal/informal and licit/illicit digital economies. Using a framework inspired by traditions of political economy and media production studies, Ong and Grohman analyze disinformation as everyday digital labor and the diverse industries and workers engaged in such disinformation production. They discuss how disinformation production has become a professionalized and diversified industry with global reach and identify the buyers and sellers of (dis)information operations around the world.
The article is open access and available on the Sage Journals website
Prof. Ong publishes new introduction to journal
