More than falsehood: conceptualising ‘the moral economy of misinformation’ in the post-truth era

This article theorises misinformation as morally and affectively meaningful storytelling embedded within what it conceptualises as a moral economy of misinformation. Rather than treating falsehood as cognitive failure or epistemic breakdown, it argues that misinformation endures because it acquires symbolic force: it affirms identities, resolves grievance and offers emotionally satisfying interpretations of contested social realities. The analysis draws on a qualitative thematic study of 426 posts and comments responding to the viral and largely false Achraf Hakimi divorce narrative, which circulated widely across African and diasporic digital platforms in 2023. The findings show that the narrative gained traction less through factual credibility than through moral plausibility. It circulated as a parable of masculine foresight and resistance to perceived female financial entitlement, resonating with anxieties about divorce, economic vulnerability and shifting gender relations. The article identifies three mechanisms through which misinformation becomes durable: value coherence, whereby narratives align with pre-existing moral worldviews; affective intensity, through which emotion transforms misinformation into an object of attachment, pleasure and identification; and premediated scripts, which render stories legible in advance of verification by activating familiar cultural templates of grievance, entitlement and moral retribution. These dynamics are intensified by platform infrastructures, including algorithms, influencer economies, meme cultures and short-form video, that privilege emotionally charged and morally legible content over empirical accuracy. Bringing moral economy theory into dialogue with feminist media studies, affect theory and digital sociology, the article develops a framework for explaining why misinformation can remain socially persuasive even after factual correction, particularly when it continues to satisfy moral expectations and affective investments. It argues that post-truth culture is less a collapse of truth than a struggle over which truths become morally persuasive in digital spaces.