The Disinformation Economy: Digital Markets of Influence, Conflict, and Polarization

The online information landscape is a site for contested ideas, but it is also a marketplace; under the platform economy, every engagement has monetary value. This setup encourages content creators to circulate the kinds of material most likely to capture attention, even if it is incendiary. Central to this business model are the algorithmic recommendation systems, which are designed to monetize attention while simultaneously amplifying disinformation (Diaz Ruiz, 2025b).

The term “Disinformation Economy” was introduced in a report published by the McCain Institute and The Carter Center (Scholtens et al., 2024). It highlights how the sources circulating disinformation extract financial benefits from digital marketing infrastructures, particularly through the architecture of advertising technologies (AdTech). Researchers estimate that 1.68% of digital advertising budgets are redirected to fake news websites, amounting to approximately US$2.4 billion in the US alone and nearly US$6 billion worldwide (Skibinski, 2023). This figure suggests that brands are inadvertently funding fake news and disinformation with their budgets (Elliott, 2022; Silverman et al., 2022).

The special issue aims to extend existing research on how platform architectures monetize and, at times, underwrite the spread of online disinformation (Recuero, 2025; Zimmerman, 2024), incentivizing the production of fake news websites (Braun & Eklund, 2019; Diaz Ruiz, 2024), and the circulation of incendiary content through the creator economy (Diaz Ruiz, 2025a). Although we know that polarization thrives in the online “conflict markets” designed to reward click maximization (Ulver, 2022), we do not know well whether influencers profiting from radicalizing content is a likely outcome of the system or a regrettable side effect (Marwick & Lewis, 2017; Radanielina Hita & Grégoire, 2023).

Policymakers increasingly recognize that malicious actors exploit digital advertising infrastructures to undermine democratic institutions and divide society (Bak et al., 2023), quickly becoming “hybrid threats,” which is when state or non-state actors seek to exploit the vulnerabilities of democracies to their own advantage while remaining below the threshold of formal warfare (European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, 2023). For instance, the infrastructures of the advertising market allow “dark money” actors to run influence campaigns unchecked (Nadler et al., 2018). A recent report by the Swedish Psychological Defense Agency, based on leaked documents from a Russian influence campaign, illustrates the emergence of a hybrid organization that applies digital marketing tools to conduct state-sponsored influence operations (Pamment & Tsurtsumia, 2025). And yet, we do not know to what extent influence operations co-opt malpractice in digital marketing.

This special issue invites contributions that seek to conceptualize and theorize disinformation research at the intersection of business, marketing, and society. However, we believe that it is insufficient merely to appreciate the problem; instead, we call for research that dares to find

solutions that can inform public policy, change managerial practice, and strengthen society. We welcome contributions that can enhance social resilience against the spread of disinformation online.

We approach disinformation broadly, in line with Bennett & Livingston’s (2023) “disinformation age,” incorporating not just falsehoods but also dual-use technologies (like AI-generated synthetic media like deepfakes), which can disrupt social realities.

Critical researchers on marketing and consumer research have, over the last decade, convincingly shown that the accelerating speed of automation, big data, and algorithmic intensification (Darmody & Zwick, 2020; Hoang et al., 2022; Zwick & Bradshaw, 2016) give rise to new “manufactured consumers” (Zwick & Denegri Knott, 2009), becoming an ever more fragmented, yet controlable, societal formation of the ‘dividual’ (Cluley & Brown, 2015; Hietanen et al., 2022). Thus, we would need to know more about how disinformation, scams, and fraud have become integral to the ebbs and flows of a digitally mediated consumer culture.