A Feminist Commodity Chain Approach to Disinformation - with Anuradha Ganapathy Artwork

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A Feminist Commodity Chain Approach to Disinformation - with Anuradha Ganapathy

August 12, 2025 • Global Development Institute

In this episode, we speak to PhD researcher Anuradha Ganapathy about her recent think piece 'Beyond Digital Platforms: Unpacking Disinformation Through a Feminist Commodity Chain Approach'.

Anuradha discusses alternative approaches to analysing disinformation, moving away from platform centricity and toward an understanding of gendered commodity chains and unpaid labour.

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Intro music Anna Banana by Eaters

Speaker 1 [00:00:02] Welcome to the Global Development Institute podcast. Based at the University of Manchester, we're Europe's largest research and teaching institute addressing poverty and inequality. Each episode, we'll bring you the latest thinking, insights, and debate in development study.

Speaker 2 [00:00:24] Hello, my name is Skyla Baily, and I'm the digital communications officer at GDI. Today, I'm joined by Anuradha Ganapathy, a PhD researcher at GDI focusing on digital development. Hi, Anurada, thank you for joining me today.

Speaker 3 [00:00:37] Thank you, Skyla. Thank you very much for having me. It's my pleasure and privilege to be here.

Speaker 2 [00:00:43] And I was wondering if at first, you could kind of tell us a bit about yourself and your research background.

Speaker 3 [00:00:50] So, yes, I'm a third year doctoral researcher at Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. I research impacts of digital technologies on social justice and inclusion. I've been working in this space for more than four years now. My research interests typically span like gender and tech, digital public infrastructures. You know, how technologies are shaping work and employment, and also sort of community-led feminist approaches to tech, like using feminist principles to understand or study the digital economy. And I'm from India, and most of my work, actually, and my field side has been India so far. So that's a bit about me.

Speaker 2 [00:01:38] So quite a broad range of focuses, but kind of around that central theme of digital development, would you say?

Speaker 3 [00:01:45] Absolutely, yeah, that's right. Digital development and sort of thinking about how it impacts social inclusion and justice, I would say that's the focus.

Speaker 2 [00:01:57] Great, so today, largely, we're gonna be talking about your most recent think piece, which was called Beyond Digital Platforms, Unpacking Disinformation Through a Feminist Commodity Chain Approach. How did you come to be interested in this topic, specifically, that you write about?

Speaker 3 [00:02:16] So I think the interest started, I think that the publication came out this year, but the interest stated a couple of years back when I was actually doing research on tech update, tech uptake in agriculture, in the farming sector in India. And I constantly kept getting this feedback that many, many small farmers are becoming very distrustful of technology, that is. Tools like WhatsApp and Facebook, and they sort of distanced themselves from these a little bit because it makes many unverified, false claims. They don't have a way of verifying the source of information. So this kept coming back as feedback. And then it's also something that we've all experienced very tangibly over the course of the couple of years, right? Like as social media increasingly mediates. Our consumption of news and happenings around the world, we're constantly being fed information and we don't know whether it's trustworthy or not, whether it is reliable or not. We don't the source of some of these claims. And we're often sort of, you know, very sceptical, which I think is good, but there is this scepticism coming around on news and how do we sort of consume news. So when I started reading up on these issues, and it had become quite a hot topic in like policy and academia. And the more I read, the more I felt that perhaps there's an opportunity to explore or to maybe zoom into dimensions that I thought were perhaps under theorised or even neglected, right? So for example, I thought that the field had a very, very heavy. Platform centric or media centric focus, right? So, I mean, media studies was obviously very interested in this issue when a lot of terms like fake news and disinformation and misinformation. And, you know, a lot of technical discussions on how misinformation is different from disinformation and that's different from hate speech. So, and then focus on like, what should Meta do to curtail disinformation? Like should it, what kind of content moderation policies should it have? Or. A lot of Twitter particularly was receiving a lot of focus and you know how Twitter's algorithms actually fuel hate speech and how disinformation is actually baked into some of the profit-making mechanisms of these platforms. So, but the reality is that, you know, probably less than 5% of the world actually uses Twitter, right? So, the fact that it is quite a narrow focus. So, in a sense, what I really wanted to see what was that if we really take a step back from these whole platforms and media and Twitter and Facebook, then what other structures of power become apparent, right? So, to reverse this whole thing, it's about what do we lose when we fetishize these platforms like tech platforms, as we call it in the digital economy space. So. What do we lose when we think of these as very deterministic or then controlling disinformation? Of course, they play an important role, but I did want to step back and that was a thread that I was like very interested in examining. I was also very interested in centering issues of, you know, gender, race, ethnicity, to see how these shape or they're shaped by disinformation because. Everyone is not equally impacted by disinformation, right? There are obviously some communities, some genders that are disproportionately more impacted than others. And in fact, disinformation has been historically sort of employed as a tool to control certain populations. So, the idea that it has always been gendered and therefore, how do we sort of study it in conjunction with these existing. Dynamics is something that I was very interested. So when the IT for Change call came out for ThinkPieces, I somehow thought that this was the opportunity for me to put all these thoughts together and make sense of these, you know, in a more coherent way. And that's really how this ThinkPiece was born.

Speaker 2 [00:06:52] Do you think that the, so in the ThinkPiece, you mentioned that there's quite a Western centric approach in this field. Do you that the focus on platforms like Twitter, like Facebook kind of is due to that, kind of ties into that bias?

Speaker 3 [00:07:08] It's a bit of that, I would say. So obviously, there are two parts to the whole Western centricity, right? So one is obviously the idea that there are, there is, this disinformation is like an exceptional phenomenon, right. So the fact that a lot of the Western centrics discourses have stemmed in reaction to specific events. So whether it was Brexit in the case of UK, or whether it was the. Russia-Ukraine war, or whether it was COVID-19. So there was this exceptionalism that was accorded to this information that it stemmed from certain events. And in fact, the term buzz, a fake news itself became a buzzword in media, because, you know, the whole term was instrumentalized by Donald Trump, who insisted that news organisations that were actually critical of. Coverage of his campaigns were actually fake news, right? So, you know, that's one way of looking at Western centricity, the platform focus, but also the focus on sort of exceptional events that have spawned or sort of accelerated the discourse on fake news and disinformation per se. But in contrast, I would say that. A lot of disinformation, particularly in the global South, lies in longer histories of, you know, social polarisation or political control, right? So many of the global south contexts have experienced disinformation against histories of colonial oppression or ethnic conflicts. For example. Let's take the example of Middle East countries. They've always had the experience of state-controlled media. So it's not like freedom of expression was the norm. You know, secrecy was the norms. So there has always been contestation around what is news that is disseminated from the top? Is there a version of the news that we're getting? Is this partial information? So even this whole idea of fake news, arguably is probably a Western understanding that there is. Like one universal truth. And then anything that does not conform to it is fake. Whereas the reality for many global South countries is that there's always been versions of truth that they have experienced and they have consumed and probably continue to consume. So that's sort of one way of looking at Western trends centristly, I would say. A platform, heavy platform focus, but also. Delinking it or dehistoricizing it from, you know, longer politics of, I would say, social and economic inequalities.

Speaker 2 [00:10:13] Very insular thinking. So just zooming back out to the title a little bit, can you maybe deconstruct what's meant by a feminist commodity chain approach to disinformation?

Speaker 3 [00:10:26] Yeah, yeah. And I think perhaps before even like I talk about the feminist commodity chain approach, right? I just spent two minutes talking about what is actually a commodity chain. Because I think it's a concept that I think very familiar for economists because it originated in the economics discipline. But what we really mean by such chain is that if we take like an ultimate consumable item and trace. Back all the inputs that culminated in this item. So, for example, if the ultimate consumable was like a cotton shirt, you know, and then the chain would include everything from the raw materials that led to the, you know, the cultivation of that shirt, a cultivation of cotton being grown in the field to how it is transported to the factory, to the manufacturer of the clock, then, you know, sizing it, cutting it, stitching it, and then eventually it's sale. Consumption, but as a user actually, that somebody actually wearing it. So this is the set of linked processes and that constitute a commodity chain. And now why is this, you know, conception even important, right? The idea is that a commodity chain makes visible the whole network of, you, know, labour and processes, production processes that make up a finished good. So from an economic perspective, the interest was in understanding how, you know, firms and corporations actually structure these chains, you know, usually they're transnational chains where commodity is being produced in, you know in some country, which is typically global south, but it's then actually being consumed in the global north. So how do corporations actually build out these transnational teams in ways that maximise their profits because they often take full advantage of, you know local labour market inequalities, particularly being able to keep the labour costs down. So in some sense, a commodity chain is an approach to like study global capitalist projects and how they accumulate value. Now, feminist commodity chain actually then focuses on what are the gendered and the social relations that underpin these stages. So whether it's, you know, women's low paid work that actually fuels some of these export oriented economies, or whether it is the neglect of the social reproductive dimensions of labour, that is like, whether it unpaid labour, unpaid domestic work of women, or the unpaid labour of caring, or work that is typically seen as operating outside the zone of production, but is still value generating because it reproduces the labour that is needed to keep the economy going. So the feminist commodity approach typically sort of visibilizes some of these processes. And so when I thought of this information as a commodity, these are some of the aspects that I wanted to visualise, that is, okay, there is this notion of falsehoods and sort of targeted hate. That is coming out, but then what are the social relationships that uphold it, that produce it, or also probably that facilitate its consumption, right? What are the gendered structures? Where is gender actually generating sort of value in this process? Is it really only an economically valuable commodity? Because obviously it's profitable for particularly digital platforms, but then are there other non-economic aspects, social, cultural, political aspects that need to be visibilized? And then this is where I thought that the analytic of the feminist commodity chain would really be useful. And that's what led me to then start using that as the device to think about this information.

Speaker 2 [00:14:22] So kind of looking at the origin, the evolution, and the structures that create and uphold and change a situation in which that idea appears. Is that right?

Speaker 3 [00:14:34] Exactly. And to also then to sort of say that, you know, digital platforms are an important part of this chain, but they're not the only part of this train, like are there different actors? You know, are there other institutional arrangements that have actually, that are actually fueling this? So to really sort of broaden the scope and bring in a broader set of actors, broader set of institutional arrangements, and then widen the scope of what this information actually is being upheld by.

Speaker 2 [00:15:16] I'm guessing these are the social reproductive dimensions of disinformation that you mentioned in the paper.

Speaker 3 [00:15:24] And I think, so I think I was also, like I said, I was very interested in understanding, it's very well established that disinformation is like a, is an economic commodity. It's a site of capitalist exchange, because there are, you know, whether it's the algorithm that feeds off or profits from inflammatory content, or whether it is workers who are probably getting incorporated into these value chains and are forced to be, you know, doing the work of, you low paid click work, or what we call trolling, for example, because they're forced to do this because there are lack of other economic options. So the idea that it is, there is an economic angle to it was very well established. But I also wanted to show how it is also sustained because disinformation is actively producing certain moral, social, or even political orders, right? So whether it's the civilising order of Hindutva as an ideology, which I talk about, which is very India specific, or whether it is even like, you know, a political agenda of say, feminism, you know, as being something as like a left liberal work ideology that cannot be taken seriously, or even like. Fueling, you know, anti-China or Chinese narratives during COVID-19, for example, this was part of upholding a certain geopolitical order of like, say, the Western, or particularly American supremacy here, right? So I think some of these cultural, these non-economic dimensions of disinformation are actually a lot more insidious and harmful because. You know, when you circulate some of this harmful propaganda or false propaganda in the form of a meme, you know, or a poem, or folklore, then, you know you can get away with saying a lot more, right? There are a lot of transgressions that are permissible in these kinds of spaces, which are probably labelled as more entertainment or leisure than you can actually do in like a political speech or in a political blog. It's very easy to. You know, dismiss feminist agendas through a meme that targets, say, feminists as, you know, anti-children or even anti-national for that matter, right? So, but you really cannot write like a coherent argument or like a scientific piece on this topic. So, somewhere there is a sort of, I don't know if it's purely non-market, but there is an ideological affiliation, there are. There are cultural elements that need to be visibleized and they are probably co-constitutive of the economic sphere or the market sphere. But I sort of wanted to, and this is what I reference as social reproductive labour. And of course, the other piece that I also talk about is that there is therefore an affective or an immaterial component. So, you're doing this not purely because there is an economic. Incentive to it, but there is, there are many, I mean, you know, people, like, let's say social media users who retweet and who sort of make some of this viral, right? Who are part of making this viral. They're not probably getting paid for it, right. So, but they're part of that circuit and there is an ideological affiliation with that project, whatever that project is. So. And this is value creating. So, you know, in some sense. So, I wanted to kind of explore this idea that it's not like just fueled by economic incentives, but it is reproducing a certain moral order. And there are many, many people involved who therefore, you know whose labour is probably more immaterial and is not easily visible, but I think it needs to be recognised or visibleized.

Speaker 2 [00:19:40] So interesting to think about the idea of engaging in social media, of retweeting something as being unpaid labour and furthering political ideology when that, yeah, I suppose that's exactly what it is or exactly what can be. And yeah, it does feel very insidious that that overlap between how political campaigns now capitalise on stuff like memes and social media and kind of translate their ideas into that very. Specific format that's palatable and shareable in that effective way. Yeah. That's really interesting. Yeah, so just drawing back to something that you mentioned quickly then, you mentioned Hindutva POP. Did you want to say anything more about that?

Speaker 3 [00:20:26] I think the one, again, the one piece that when I sort of decentered platforms and I started thinking about who are the other actors, it was interesting for me to learn that how, you know, musicians and folklore and some of these, you know cultural artists can actually become like artists or become key actors in the chain, right? So. So I speak about this in the book by, I cite this book extensively in my, maybe not extensively, but I cite it in my think piece, which is the book on Hindutva POP. It's by a writer named Kunal Purohit. And I think I learned a lot about how, like I said, you know, actors whom we're not typically seeing as mainstream, but like folklore and cultural artists, singers, have actually played an important role in sort of perpetuating many, many falsehoods or in replicating some of these myths. So I think he, for example, he talks about the role played by a singer and a songwriter in Rwanda. And I think, I don't remember the name of the singer, but I think it was called Michael Jackson of Rwander. His music actually played an active role in like stoking hatred against the Tutsis, which was the community that was actually targeted in the Rwandan genocide. So I do think it's important to, you know, sort of continue to look at, I mean, there are a lot of grey zones in disinformation. Probably there are some that we don't even know about today, which is why I think it is very important to look it how and where disinformation gets. It's produced and the sort of, and I think we'd be surprised to know that there are so many grey zones in this that we've probably not explored so far. At least that was something I learned when I was writing this piece.

Speaker 2 [00:22:32] I think we might've touched on this a little bit already, but could you maybe speak to some of the contradictions and how some actors in the disinformation chain are vilified like, I suppose, politicians in some cases, whereas PR firms and other actors who are maybe marketed differently kind of are also spreading disinformation, but it feels more respected or under the radar, if that makes sense. Just kind of this difference in how we hold different actors accountable.

Speaker 3 [00:23:07] Yeah, and I think that was one of the key, something that I had read and something that I wanted also my think piece to visible eyes, right? Like the idea that like a lot of, it's very easy to sort of vilify trolls, right, and quote unquote to say that, okay, you have trolls and they are the evil, so to speak, but. Obviously, trolling is part of a systematic effort to silence certain communities and certain discourses. So, you need to see trolling also not as individual users who are doing this, but also as part of a larger effort and usually, and that's where ideas of political campaigning, I mean, it is quite professionalised, which is something I also discovered when I was reading that. A lot of these, who is to say what is trolling and what is influencing, right? So, the influencer obviously sounds a lot more probably elitist than trolling, but the reality is that a lot of this is part of like an organised campaign, political campaigning, and political campainging is becoming a big part of. Of many countries today, it's part of the politics of many companies today. This is a fairly organised profession. It is quote unquote, even probably seen as respectable when you give it the name of political campaigning, right, as against trolling. So, there is a guise of respectability around it. It's, and this is where some of these, you can see the everydayness of this information as opposed to its exceptionalism, right? So. There have already always existed public relations practises, which in some sense could be seen as a way of sort of manipulating narratives or deliberately highlighting or focusing on some narratives over others, or practises. I mean, others have been quite blunt to call it practises of organised lying. So, in some sense, disinformation has been a continuity of some of these processes, but these don't get as talked about. So, you're very quick to sort of talk about why, about trolls and sort of vilified trolls, but you don't necessarily then look at, you know, practises of political campaigning and who is actually funding some of the campaigns. And. Why these professions have come to exist in the first place. So, again, that whole hierarchy of labour and why certain zones are very easily visible, but these sort of grey zones, which are very much part of the disinformation architecture don't end up getting visible eyes or don't ended up getting attention. So, which is why a lot of. Some of the recommendations which I've also covered talk about the fact that we need more transparency and accountability of political campaigning spending because a lot of disinformation actually stems from that engine, from the machinery of PR and public relations and not necessarily from the low-hanging fruits of, you know, social media and which is of course, I mean, it's not to sort of deny their involvement. I think they're very deeply implicated in this process. But I think the idea is to broaden the scope of intervention and also bring in actors like these, which are in quote unquote, probably seen as more respectable positions, but then very much part and parcel of this industry, if I can call it that.

Speaker 2 [00:27:02] Yeah, for sure. So I'm gonna switch us back towards gender just again, for a minute. In the way that, so we've kind of talked about how gender, its role in kind of creating and reproducing these disinformation networks, chains. How can it be both a target and a tool within like, as in like for the final product, I suppose. On the other side, on the consumer side, where does gender come into it? Is that something that you've talked about much?

Speaker 3 [00:27:39] And I think gender is like both very clearly, like you said, like you rightly said, it's like target as well as the tool, right? So one way to look at it is that gender is weaponized through disinformation campaigns that really. Target women and perpetuate stereotypes. For example, there are a lot of gender narratives that are used to discredit female political leaders, and here women are very clearly the target. But then gender also becomes a way, and this is where it's a tool, right? It's not necessarily the object, but it's also a tool to dismiss certain forms of politics. So let's take the example of Greta Thunberg, who was like. You know, the environmental activists or climate change activists, most of us, all of us I guess know about her. I'm constantly going after her looks or appearance and age and you know, or using tropes of, you know she's an irrational feminist, you know? Or depicting her as therefore uninformed. Is also a way of dismissing her ideas and her politics around climate change and climate justice, right? Because you probably don't get beyond some of these dismissals. So in some sense, it is obviously Greta Thunberg is the object of disinformation, is the the object of some of the targeted campaigns I would say. But here you also see that disinformation is. Is also a tool for misogyny because you know, it is about personally slandering the individual. Like if you take in the West, in the Americas in particular, right? You know, misinformation regarding abortion. Has been systematically used to target like women's health services and reproductive justice options. And so especially like access to abortion. So women seeking abortion have been painted as a promiscuous and so you see how women and women's Health is the subject of disinformation, but then also women being the objects and being targeted. So it's very deeply entangled with. You know, misogyny and like an anti feminist politics and this is what I'm trying to say when I say that it's they are both the target, but they're also a tool.

Speaker 2 [00:30:16] Yeah, absolutely. And I think Greta Thunberg is a great example there, especially recently when she's been in the media in relation to Gaza. I feel like so much of the messaging in the media around her or from political leaders is very infantilizing when they talk about her. And I suppose the function of that is to then in conjunction and infantilize what she's saying in relation to the conflicts and all kind of. Is this interconnected web. So yeah, it's a great example for putting it in context.

Speaker 3 [00:30:52] Yeah, yeah. And so the point is that you don't engage with the arguments and the politics, but you sort of engage with it at the. You know, through the structures of power or through gender and through the infantilization or paternalizing some of these arguments, right? So that's where I think it becomes like a tool to dismiss certain forms of politics also. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 [00:31:20] So off the back of that, what was a feminist community oriented, justice oriented infrastructure look like for kind of addressing disinformation in practise? I know you've mentioned one of your recommendations already, but how do you, where do you think we go from here? How do we take it forward?

Speaker 3 [00:31:41] Yeah, I think it's a huge task. I think my think piece outlines interventions across several spaces, right? From academia to policy to multilaterals organisations to civil society organisations. But I would say that there are a couple of things that I probably could highlight here. One being that we definitely need more research on disinformation and its overlaps with. Various forms of gender repressions, right? Including its manifestations with like say, women's health, reproductive justice, climate change, indigenous rights. I think this information in that sense still continues to be narrowly studied and the fact that it's a cross-cutting intersectional issue, we need to develop first of all, a more comprehensive understanding of some of these engagements. I also think there is. Room and opportunity to fund like more community-based participatory research projects where the subjects or the objects of these disinformation are centred. So working with communities that are particularly vulnerable to disinformation, amplifying their voices, even bridging key knowledge gaps, developing. Mitigation and resilience strategies. So one example, it's not in the disinformation space, but it's an example in the digital labour space where there's a worker-led intervention which is called Data Workers' Inquiry and it's funded. It's a project in which data workers who are perhaps doing a lot of the exploitative work of moderating harmful content and things like that, they are coming together and they're actually participating as researchers and. They're leading their own inquiry into the conditions that make their work exploitative and they're coming up with recommendations. So maybe something like that in this area where communities that are actually impacted then come and participate and lead inquiry into these spaces. We do need, and this is where I think we need to broaden the scope beyond platforms, right? That is. A significant capacity gap, I would say, whether it's in just literacy around understanding on critically analysing and comprehending information and sort of being able to decide whether a particular information is true, false, or even engaging with it more critically, knowing that true, falls are not always absolutes, but being able to engage critically with information. These are capacities that we need to build. You know, across societies, I would say, or even the capacity of groups that are targeted by some of these interventions or some of the targeted attacks, right? How can they respond? How can the build collective resistance? How can we fund these kinds of resistance or solidarity movements as an area? And then perhaps putting in place greater, more mechanisms for like public and stakeholder engagement, like working with citizens, civil society groups. Is there like an anti-disinformation architecture that is possible? Can we democratise this architecture? In my think these have spoken about, given an example of one bottom-up approach. To counter disinformation, which is the Taiwan government's public digital innovation system there. There is a rather unconventional team, including like graphic designers and comedy writers, and we're working inside the government, you know, creating memes, and basically trying creative approaches to try and mitigate falsehoods. So, I do think we need to sort of... Broaden the scope, include a larger set of actors, democratise the decisions around this and bring in more collaborations, whether it's research and academia, or whether it is between state and citizens, or whether its between civil society actors and multilateral organisations. I do think there's a lot more that needs to be done around policy, but also around capacity building.

Speaker 2 [00:36:09] Do you have any plans to kind of take this forward yourself in any form? So I think...

Speaker 3 [00:36:14] The think piece, I would say, has been a starting point for me. My interest in this has stemmed from my interest in sort of, you know, a more feminist, giving this sort of a more feminist analysis to it. And if there's one thing that I'd like to do, then I would definitely be interested in looking at or exploring sort of participatory action research in this space, like I said, where you can actually work with communities that are impacted by this to understand what could be potential lines of inquiry that we could pursue, or even remedial measures, for that example. Like I said the idea came to me when I was working with communities. So if I would like to pursue something, it will definitely be in the space of sort of developing more community led or community owned interventions that can actually respond to targeted disinformation exercises.

Speaker 2 [00:37:22] I'm looking forward to reading anything else that you write on the subject. Is there anything, if you could leave us with kind of one takeaway that we as individuals could consider in terms of our place in these disinformation chains or maybe about how we consume it, what would that be? Sorry, that's quite a hard question to start out with.

Speaker 3 [00:37:47] Yeah, I don't know whether I have like one wise thing to say to start, but I think what I've learned from writing this article because it's not been like a topic that I have extensively focused on, I would say. So I learned a lot myself from writing the speech. And I think... The hypothesis that I went into when I started writing this was about the fact that it's not a technological or a platform problem. And I think that was confirmed. I do think platforms are deeply implicated, but there's a larger issue and it's in some sense like an information epidemic that we need to tackle. So it is very much woven into global and local systems of power, politics, and identity. And I think my takeaway from writing that whole piece was that it needs to be recognised as an issue of intersectional violence. So it is a form of violence and it is an intersectional issue of, whether it's gender, race, sexuality, political ideologies, we do need to see it as like a cross-cutting issue that perhaps... Cuts through several domains and aspects of our lives. And I think that's the starting point of even thinking about what could be a comprehensive solution to fight disinformation.

Speaker 2 [00:39:12] Thank you so much for talking to me about your research and about your think piece. It's been so interesting to hear more about it. Yeah, thank you so for joining us today. Thank you. Thank you, Skyla, for having me. I really enjoyed it.

Speaker 3 [00:39:22] I really enjoyed having this conversation.