Repeat until true: The big lie as narrative weapon in participatory authoritarianism

The term “Big Lie” re-emerged in political discourse in the wake of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, but this phenomenon can be identified across global contexts where digital technologies amplify politically charged falsehoods. This commentary offers a critical mapping of the Big Lie as both a discursive weapon and a digitally enabled social phenomenon, tracing its genealogy from early philosophical conceptions of noble lies through twentieth-century totalitarian propaganda to today's algorithmically enhanced disinformation campaigns. We suggest that today's computational, networked, and geographically distributed digital media infrastructure is weaponized by the powerful instigators of the Big Lie to constitute and maintain an illiberal form of governance we call participatory authoritarianism, in which citizens feel affectively involved in government but are instead participating in their own exclusion from democratic processes and their attendant rights and opportunities.

Tracing the lineage of the Big Lie

A Big Lie is a mythopoetic narrative act that, wielded by powerful actors, can mobilize, divide, and even incite people to violence. It is repeated so widely and so frequently that even those who know it to be false are forced to acknowledge its existence, and as such it shapes both public discourse and policy. Historically, the Big Lie has appeared in various regimes, typically to justify violence. An 1888 article in the satirical magazine Puck highlighted “the greatest lie of the nineteenth century—the doctrine of slavery as a divine institution.” Stalin's Soviet Union denied the Ukrainian famine known as the Holodomor, fabricated conspiracies to justify purges, and falsely attributed the Katyn massacre to the Nazis. Maoist China inflated grain production numbers and denied famine during the Great Leap Forward. In the U.S., myths like the Lost Cause, McCarthyism, and the WMD narrative used to justify the Iraq War each reflect Big Lie strategies that enabled systemic violence and war.

In the twenty-first century, Big Lies appear in fabricated U.S. election fraud claims and pandemic conspiracies. Russia, in particular, used disinformation to justify its 2022 invasion of Ukraine—falsely claiming a need to “de-Nazify” the country and defend Russian speakers. Such narratives obscure material realities, delegitimize democratic institutions, and serve elite or authoritarian interests.

Lying is not always condemned in the public square. The Big Lie has a more positively framed sibling in the ancient notion of the Noble Lie.

The Noble Lie. Plato recounts in The Republic the parable of metals in which all citizens are siblings, but born with different divinely instilled metals: bronze and iron for the workers, silver for the warriors, and gold for the rulers. This is the essence of the Noble Lie: an instrument of social cohesion and control by elites, who tell such stories with the aim of “making [the lower classes] more inclined to care for the state and one another.” These narratives are a deliberate manipulation (or “contrivance,” in Plato's words) designed to serve the interests of the ruling class and maintain social harmony. They are motivated by a paternalistic sense of what is “for their own good” when it comes to the masses (which also just happens to be favorable to elites as well), often cloaked in the virtue of religious or mythical framing and the elegance of metaphor.

Big Lie as Ignoble Lie. The Big Lie, as we define it, is also an instrument of social control, but wielded as a hammer of dominance. There is no sincere attempt at disguising the lie from what it is: a blatant, easily disproved falsehood repeatedly stated as fact. Accepting the lie often requires renouncing previously known facts and accepting the new reality, simply to signal allegiance to the powerful. It is, one might say, an Ignoble Lie, uttered not for even a semblance of greater good but for the sole purpose of domination.

It can also be seen as part of a more widespread reaction to the predominance of the knowledge society and economy since at least the mid-twentieth century, a rebellion against the “established knowledge order” leading to the formation of digitally enabled “counter-knowledge orders” (Primig, 2025). This creates an epistemic crisis that exploits the knowledge society in the service of anti-intellectual and anti-institutional forces.

While such collectives may also emerge organically, the Big Lie instead involves powerful actors who deliberately mobilize publics willing to submit to a regime of “alternative facts” in exchange for a sense of belonging, the pleasure of radically subverting social and political norms felt as oppressive, and perceived proximity to rising power. Importantly, these counter-knowledge orders then take on a life of their own through a mechanism we refer to as participatory authoritarianism.

Authoritarianism & the digital

Populist-driven authoritarian movements are not entirely new. Historian Eric Hobsbawm (1994) identified the key difference between fascism and other right-wing movements as the focus on “mobilizing masses from below” (p. 117). Joseph Fronczak (2018) later termed this phenomenon participatory antidemocracy, calling it the “central paradox of fascism” since it provided “a mechanism for common people to politically assert themselves” while simultaneously building an infrastructure of suppression (p. 571). This set fascist movements apart from classic top-down reactionaries who favored military might over populism.

Participatory authoritarianism is instead a hybrid regime in which authoritarian leadership deliberately leverages the interactive affordances of digital media to convert ordinary citizens from passive subjects into active and networked co-producers of state power. Whereas twentieth-century authoritarian systems relied on one-to-many media that rendered the public largely consumers of centrally scripted narratives, participatory authoritarian regimes operate within many-to-many, datafied environments that position ordinary users as prosumers who create, amplify, and enforce pro-regime content, police dissent, and generate legitimizing social force. Every micro-action—e.g. posting, sharing, commenting, hashtagging—feeds back into, expands, and bolsters structures of control, enabling authorities to outsource both propaganda and repression while claiming popular legitimacy.

Building on Levitsky and Way's (2002) competitive authoritarianism, this model shifts focus from electoral institutions to socio-technical architectures mediating political communication. Unlike top-down digital authoritarianism (MacKinnon, 2011), it foregrounds citizens’ voluntary labor in sustaining official narratives. Paid influence operations may remain important, but they interweave with constellations of unpaid zealots whose genuine enthusiasm lends authenticity to orchestrated messages.

Participatory authoritarianism lowers the cost of rule by outsourcing propaganda and policing to the governed and it complicates democratic responses because the line between genuine grassroots support and orchestrated mobilization becomes indistinct.

This is a distinctly socio-technical phenomenon: participatory authoritarianism is algorithmic, networked, and geographically distributed. It is fundamentally reliant upon affective publics (Papacharissi, 2015), assemblages based on “mediated feelings of connectedness . . . through the storytelling infrastructures of a digital age” (p. 7), deliberately constituted or encouraged by ruling elites. This represents a substantially algorithmic approach to human sociality, “at the intersection of computational space, cultural systems, and human cognition” (Finn, 2017, p. 5). Digital communication systems structure our social connections, our understanding of the world through the various information feeds we are served, and ultimately how we feel about current events and the people, organizations, and institutions that create them. And they do so across space and time to form publics that might never have interacted on a physical plane.

Weaponizing the mendacious narrative

This concept illuminates how the Big Lie can thrive in a decentralized media ecosystem. It sharpens the attention to regimes where millions willingly work to sustain systemic untruths, not merely accept them. By mobilizing armies of human and nonhuman users to repeat, remix, and defend official narratives at unprecedented scale, participatory authoritarianism creates a dense information fog in which empirical refutation becomes socially costly and cognitively exhausting. Understanding the mutually reinforcing dynamics between autocratic strategies and participatory allowances is essential for explaining how mass, networked, and interactive engagement doesn’t threaten, but can actively consolidate authoritarian rule in the twenty-first century.

Participation in the Big Lie demands more than simple naivety and submissiveness to authority. It requires, to borrow language from Eve Sedgwick (1997) and Paul Ricoeur (1970), respectively, a kind of “paranoid reading” and “hermeneutic of suspicion” so pronounced as to short-circuit all plain evidence to the contrary. Paranoid reading represents a critical approach to reading social narratives or other texts informed by deep skepticism and suspicion, one that always looks for hidden meanings, oppressive or nefarious behaviors and structures, and malicious, coercive intent. Hermeneutics of suspicion is a sort of politicized, occult-exegetic strategy that seeks to expose the always-already-assumed hidden and iniquitous operations of power, bias, control, and oppression.

Participation in the Big Lie is productive of communities—hermeneutic, epistemological, and moral communities of occult knowledge that are bound together by their simultaneous defiance of one set of authorities and their assent to another. This community knows the “real story” behind the façade. Through participatory performance in digital environments, those who support the Big Lie serve to establish, vitalize, and maintain these communities, produce their subjectivities as members in good standing, and police the boundaries that define the community. These performances constitute, individually and collectively, a kind of “moral identity maintenance” strategy (Rothschild and Keefer, 2017).

Amplified by digital systems, the Big Lie is thus a collective identity generator. It creates affective publics that may become bounded communities, which in turn harden into identities centered around adoption of the Lie—and most importantly, the public expression of that adoption. The narratives generated around the Big Lie are intended to reinforce those identities, distinguish them as separate from the non-adopters who inhabit the spectrum of ignorance to evil, and erect barricades against counternarratives. These battles represent, as Ajit Maan explained, “not just a fight between truth and lies. It is a fight over meaning and identity—the meaning of the truth and the meaning of the lies” (2018: 11). The Big Lie co-opts the language of independence and freedom long used to champion democratic society, and weaponizes these ideas into a wholly contrary set of meanings and identities through participatory authoritarianism.

Conclusion

We argue that the contemporary form of the Big Lie acts as a politically charged narrative object that operates through digital infrastructures that enable unprecedented scales of repetition, coordination, and selective amplification. Beyond merely describing falsehoods, the Big Lie constructs moral frameworks, signals epistemic crisis, and reveals how digital technologies can be weaponized by authoritarian actors to exploit institutional vulnerabilities in democratic systems and establish a form of participatory authoritarianism in their stead. The rise of these networked hybrid regimes is a global phenomenon that offers expansive fertile terrain for Big Lies. As seen in present U.S. and Russian contexts, authoritarian leaders and their supporters continue to deploy politicized narratives, rewriting history in order to materially shape the present and future.