Collaborative Mistrust: The Communicative Function of Alternative Facts in Social Media Interactions

Abstract

Understanding social media discourses as conversations and interpreting them as such allows reconstructing the communicative function of alternative facts as a practical achievement making a difference in interactive sensemaking. Using the documentary method approach to conversation analysis for interpreting the doing of alternative facts in conversations on the Facebook pages of the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), this article shows: (1) doing alternative facts has to be understood in the context of identity performances which bracket questions of facticity; (2) doing alternative facts is part of an overarching conversational dynamic of “suspicious investigation” held together by a shared orientation toward un-truthing mainstream reality construction; (3) and this dynamic immunizes itself against critique via identity performance and identity misrecognition.