In conjunction with the exhibition Truth That Lies, Impakt Festival has organised a panel around the topics of misinformation, alternative facts, fake news and information manipulation where Florian Cramer, Tomislav Medak and Emillie de Keulenaar were present as speakers. Social media sites and search engines are the key ingredients of the change from the manipulative form of propaganda […]

In early December 2018, BAU (Design College of Barcelona) and GREDITS (in collaboration with Artnodes, HANGAR and Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Arts) organised their second ‘Interface Politics’ conference, this time focusing on the topic of post-truth. The conference “encourages not only the academic community, but also artists, designers and activists to share their experience and […]

We published a scholarly article in M/C Journal on the origins and dynamics of the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, in which a wildly speculative narrative was constructed about a secret child sex ring led by Democrat officials. This conspiracy, as is argued, was enabled by the affordances of 4chan, that stimulate a “butterfly effect” of bullshit. […]

Marc Tuters of OILab joined a conference panel organised by the Stimuleringsfonds voor de Journalistiek and IMMovator, together with journalist Joris Luyendijk and writer/Internet-sceptic Evgeny Morozov. Tuters touched upon the merging dynamics between Internet memes and post-truth politics, forming vehicles for political propaganda. In doing so, Tuters claims the meme-culture of these online right-wing movements […]

One of the main Dutch public broadcasters, VPRO, featured an article in their magazine with comments from Marc Tuters of OILab. It raises questions on 4chan’s current culture as a cultic milieu, and how to consider the humorous politics of Kekistan, a fake country dedicated to trolling campaigns targeting identity politics. “Wat is de voedingsbodem […]

OILab’s research on thematising memes was featured in an article by De Correspondent, an online platform for investigative journalism. In the Digital Methods Initiative’s 2018 winter school, Sal Hagen from OILab, together with a group of researchers, classified memes from 4chan/pol/ as related to specific themes. The research is written up on the DMI website. […]

Marc Tuters was interviewed for a piece on fluter.de – “Warum die Trump-Fans dem Präsidenten weiter treu bleiben.” It features a discussion on the dynamics of the content aggregator Reddit, and how it enables r/The_Donald as a hub for pro-Trump activity. Read the text here (German). Read the text in English (translated by Google Translate).

OILab’s original research on the birth of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, conducted during the Digital Methods Initiative‘s Winter School 2018, has been featured in an article by Dimitri Tokmetzis in De Correspondent. Read the article here. Read the original research report here.

In a second piece with Geert Lovink, Marc Tuters of OILab discusses the use of memes in conversation with Walter Benjamin’s theory of dialectical images. In doing so, it attempts to develop how memes can be understood as a continuation of Benjamin’s mention of ‘genuine images in language’, with the objective “to contemplate this seemingly […]

Marc Tuters of OILab was recently interviewed by the Dutch kids magazine 7Days, focusing on educational articles for teenagers. Tuters touched on the definition of memes, and their poitical usage. Read the article (in Dutch) below.