The Escalating Dis/Organization of Post-truth Communication

The proliferation of misleading and deceptive communication in public discourse especially on social media, often referred to as post-truth communication (PTC), presents a pressing challenge to democratic societies today. While PTC thrives on disrupting formal organizations such as political parties, academic institutions, legacy media, and business firms, in doing so it also brings forth its own forms of dis/organization. To date, however, the orgnizational dynamics at the heart of PTC have received only scant attention in organization theory. We shed new light on these dynamics by drawing on a perspective that considers communication as constitutive of organization (CCO), advancing this perspective with Michel Serres’ notion of the “parasite”. We develop a model of escalating dis/organization highlighting how social-media-afforded PTC maintains its own organizational properties by disorganizing formal organizations. More specifically, we show how PTC accomplishes communicative interconnectivity, identity and actorhood by “parasitizing” these same properties of formal organization through escalating disruption of decision-making, identity simulation, and coordinated authority exploitation. Our study adds to organization theory in two main ways. First, we offer an integrative explanation of how social-media-afforded PTC perpetuates its organizational existence by parasitizing formal organization. Second, our reflections on escalating forms of dis/organization informs scholarship on how to conceptualize asymmetrical and exploitative dependency relations between formal and partial organization. Our study also yields practical implications for how formal organizations can respond to and avoid the polarizing effects of PTC on social media by embracing rather than seeking to suppress their inherent parasitic properties.