Digital disinformation and the imaginative dimension of communication 1 Digital disinformation and the imaginative dimension of communication Jason Vincent A. Cabañes De La Salle University—Manila, Philippines Preformatted final version. 16 April 2020 Original citation Cabañes, JVA (2019) “Digital disinformation and the imaginative dimension of communication”. Special issue: Advancing Journalism and Communication Research: New Theories and Concepts. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, online first. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699020913799 Abstract To nuance current understandings of the proliferation of digital disinformation, this article seeks to develop an approach that emphasizes the imaginative dimension of this communication phenomenon. Anchored on ideas about the sociality of communication, this piece conceptualizes how fake news and political trolling online work in relation to particular shared understandings people have of their sociopolitical landscape. It offers the possibility of expanding the information-oriented approach to communication taken by many journalistic interventions against digital disinformation. It particularly opens up alternatives to the problematic strategy of challenging social media manipulation solely by doubling down on objectivity and facts. Keywords digital disinformation, fake news, political trolling, social narratives, audiences The slew of recent works on digital disinformation has spotlighted the unprecedented proliferation of organized information disorder campaigns across the globe. Many of these works—including those from journalists and academics alike—have focused on revealing the startling arsenal of social media manipulation strategies that have been developed in different countries the world over (Bradshaw & Howard, 2017). They have cataloged, among others, Cambridge Analytica’s psychographic targeting experiments on Facebook (Cadwalladr & Graham-Harrison, 2018; Ireton & Posetti, 2018), the Russian troll army’s anti-Western operations on Twitter (Martineau, 2019; Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017), and the Chinese “Fifty-Cent Army’s” strategic distraction initiatives within their own country’s “Great Firewall” (Jing, 2016; King et al., 2017). Many of these works have been crucial to mapping out the toxic confluence of socio-structural, technological, and even personal conditions that have led to the rapid innovations characterizing today’s information disorder online. Indeed, they have been at the heart of how different governments, big