Politics of Disinformation. Группа авторов

Introduction

      Concerns about disinformation have witnessed extraordinary growth since the mid-2010s, despite the spread of false and distorted messages in the public arena not being a new phenomenon. In 2016, the Oxford Dictionary declared “post-truth” its word of the year, highlighting a historical and political time in which disinformation strategies reached new heights, fueled by the hybridization of the communicative ecosystem (Chadwick 2017) in a context of increasing polarization and populism. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the Brexit referendum the same year were milestones in the awareness of the role that manipulative messages play and their effects on political decisions, particularly in times of crisis (Spence et al. 2016).

      Disinformation strategies take advantage of social networks to go viral quickly, and benefit from another of these networks’ inherent characteristics: their ability to discriminate and stratify the public according to the most diverse criteria (Wagner and Boczkowski 2019). Any person or company with a sufficiently large and specialized database can now distribute content among the public according to multiple criteria, allowing much more to be known about their tastes, hobbies, opinions, etc. than in the past. In fact, data on the public’s participation on social networks (who they follow, in which groups they participate, what content they share, etc.) are one of the main elements that help increase the effectiveness of the messages sent to the public. The snowball of disinformation can, in fact, sustain itself and improve its effectiveness in each wave (Tucker et al. 2018).

      The potential of social networks to disseminate disinformation rises in importance while their role as main sources of information gains strength (Gottfried and Shearer 2017), especially during electoral processes (Allcott and Gentzkow 2017). Given that disinformation takes advantage of increasingly polarized public opinion (Horta Ribeiro et al. 2017; Lewandowsky et al. 2017), its pernicious effects on political debate and decision-making demand greater knowledge of the reasoning behind the dissemination of disinformation (Flynn et al. 2017).

Post-truth consequences in democracy have received much social, political, and academic attention in recent years. This book is a collection of international studies that are representative of leading research focusing on disinformation. It is structured in parts that correspond to the book’s four main objectives: first, to offer theoretical approaches to disinformation; second, to analyze the role of disinformation in politics; third, to expand on disinformation fact-checking strategies; and finally, to further explore the exposure and effects of disinformation.

      The three chapters included in Part I of the book provide the theoretical basis to understand disinformation. In “Disinformation Matters: Analyzing the Academic Production” (Chapter 1), Nereida Cea and Bella Palomo explain how this topic has become a fertile, priority, and worldwide line of research. In “A Materialist Approach to Fake News” (Chapter 2), Thales Lelo and Roseli Fígaro systematize the main trends in current scholarship regarding fake news to propose a materialistic approach to the issue. They try to elucidate socio-historical aspects that connect fake news with profound transformations in capital accumulation cycles. Chapter 3, “Using International Relations Theories to Understand Disinformation: Soft Power, Narrative Turns, and New Wars” by Giuseppe Anzera and Alessandra Massa, describes how disinformation is affected by long-standing trends and the competitive manipulation of information through actions designed to reshape reality to attain political goals.

      Part

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