Birds Aren’t Real: Vigilante Civic Literacies for Classroom Counterpublics

• In Event: Disassembling Mis/Disinformation, Reassembling Democracy: Theory, Practice, and Possibilities

Abstract

As recent history has shown, an information ecology polluted with fake news, mis/disinformation, and conspiracy theories can breed division, anxiety, and hatred—forces that pose profound challenges to nurturing a civically engaged, democratic citizenry. But is that always the case? Created in 2017 by college student Peter McIndoe, the youth-led faux conspiracy Birds Aren’t Real asserts that birds were replaced by avian drones to spy on Americans starting in the 1960s. This message has been ardently spread by its adherents, or “Bird Truthers,” across social media platforms, street protests, and high-school football games (Williams, 2022).
Having discovered Birds Aren’t Real while conducting an earlier study of institutional responses to digital “dismisnfo” (Authors 5 & 6, 2023), it was clear to us that the movement was engaged in a rather idiosyncratic response to our polluted information ecologies, one that, paradoxically, seemed to work to increase the level of pollution as opposed to reducing it—namely, by spreading a satirical conspiracy theory. Through such antics, Birds Aren't Real has emerged as a singular voice in the digital media sphere—at once parodying and critiquing the nature of conspiracies as well as the ease with which they spread. The satirical conspiracy movement Birds Aren't Real, we argue, offers a curious example of how a faux conspiracy theory can counterintuitively use poetic worldmaking practices to create counterpublics (Warner, 2002) that engage in democratic civic action across digital platforms and real life, but do so by actively increasing the noise in the system.
To develop this analysis, we take up Moncada’s (2017) definitional work on vigilantism, which, as he explained, is composed of five core features: social organization, target, repertoire, justification, and motivation. That is, vigilante justice, both in its digital and non-digital forms, requires some form of social organization, the social relations that facilitate extra-institutional justice, which is directed at a target individual or group. Vigilantes then enact a specific repertoire of actions, or the sometimes violent, other times non-violent practices by which they pursue and enforce what they believe to be just outcomes. These practices are legitimized by a justification—a vigilante’s public-facing rationale, often grounded in strains of ideology, identity, and/or fear—which Moncada pairs with motivation, or the vigilante’s private and perhaps more opaque reasons for acting.
Guided by Moncada's theoretical work on vigilantism, this Critical Content Analysis (Beach et al., 2009; Short, 2019) of Birds Aren’t Real describes how Bird Truthers enact vigilante civic literacies, authentic forms of youth-led activism in which literacy practices are deployed outside of and/or against institutional constraints in the service of collective, democratic good. Through this study, we suggest that beyond merely integrating Birds Aren’t Real into classroom media literacy lessons, English language arts classrooms can become civic-minded counterpublics in their own right—spaces where students' literacies are mobilized to interrogate institutional power, imagine alternative futures, and engage in novel forms of civic participation.

Authors

• William J. Fassbender, Montana State University

• Bradley Robinson, Texas State University