Abstract
Over time, WikiLeaks has adjusted its strategies to take better advantage of a densely populated and globally networked media environment, and the larger reality of an ongoing political legitimation crisis. By directing attention to injustices associated with free trade and the security state, the whistle-blower platform has provided fodder for foreign news operations such as Russia Today, progressive alternative platforms like Democracy Now and The Young Turks and right-wing populist and/or conspiracy-oriented news forums like Breitbart and InfoWars. In the process WikiLeaks has been able to deliver its message of an ostensibly corrupt and broken political/economic order to divergent audiences in a way compatible with its anarchist agenda.
Side by side with the official myth of a beleaguered government threatened by riots, demonstrations, and unmotivated, irrational assassinations of public figures, a popular mythology has taken shape that sees government as a conspiracy against the people themselves.
(Christopher Lasch 1984, 44)
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Marmura, S.M.E. (2018). Emerging Affinities: WikiLeaks in the Context of a Legitimation Crisis. In: The WikiLeaks Paradigm. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97139-1_5
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