Digital Anti-Rationalism: Understanding the Alignment of Vitalism, Social Media, and Right-Wing Messaging

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between social media and fascism. The main argument is that social media
and fascism share anti-rational drives. For fascism, this is due to its roots in vitalism, and for social media, it is due to its
position in a continuum of media concision. Through an interdisciplinary analysis including media studies, propaganda
analysis, and scholarship on fascism, the paper will expand on the concept of concision in the media as elucidated by Noam
Chomsky, applying it to social media to demonstrate how it limits evidence-based argumentation. This will be done by
situating social media within a larger trajectory of concision, showcasing how social media platforms like X, TikTok, and more,
are concise by design. The paper will then trace the anti-rationalist roots of fascism, focusing on the connections to vitalism
and its dependence on intuition and emotion instead of evidence and rationality. By linking those elements to social media,
the paper will ultimately articulate the ways in which the concision of social media and the anti-rationalism of fascism align,
creating a media ecosphere that privileges fascist rhetoric due to its inherent irrationality. This examination will look at those
pieces in conjunction with the “firehose of falsehood” propaganda model, which relies on rapid, high-volume media content.
The ultimate argument of this paper is that social media, in their concision, limit discourse in a way that undermines
rationality, presenting significant implications for politics around the world.