As presidential elections carry the promise of distilling the contested and elusive “will of the people,” the protracted media event intensifies the public demand for exposing the transgressions of the aspiring political elite. This expectation provides fertile ground for investigative journalism, ultrapartisan smear campaigns, fake news, and full‐fledged conspiracy theories that are sometimes difficult to differentiate from one another in a hybridized media space. We compare three unique conspiracy stories—Macronleaks, Pizzagate, and Voter fraud—emerging during the previous French and American elections. We assess the divergent strategies of social action that contribute to the stories’ dissimilar patterns for intervening the political news cycle with the “reinformative toolkit” and deconstruct the common conspiratorial “masterplot” for “reinforming” the public. Focusing on online “produsers”—media users functioning as (dis)information producers—we analyze how the grassroots level participated in shaping the conspiracy stories’ synopses and channeling news‐framed, conspiratory content between mainstream and “countermedia” outlets.

中文翻译：

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假新闻之外的阴谋。跨国混合媒体系统中有关总统选举的令人耳目一新的信息

随着总统选举带来了提炼有争议和难以捉摸的“人民意志”的希望，旷日持久的媒体事件加剧了公众对揭露有抱负的政治精英的犯罪的需求。这种期望为调查性新闻，超党派的涂片运动，假新闻以及成熟的阴谋论提供了沃土，而这些阴谋论有时在混合媒体领域很难彼此区分开。我们比较了三个独特的阴谋故事-Macronleaks，Pizzagate和Voter欺诈-在先前的法国和美国大选期间出现。我们评估了社会行动的不同策略，这些策略助长了故事的不同模式，从而通过“重新提供信息的工具包”介入政治新闻周期，并解构了常见的阴谋“主图”，以“重新告知”公众。针对在线“ produsers”（媒体用户充当（dis）信息制作者），我们分析了基层如何参与塑造阴谋故事的提要，以及如何在主流和“反媒体”媒体之间传播以新闻为框架的阴谋内容。