La diffusione delle fake news in ambiente digitale: i rischi per le imprese e le strategie di contrasto

[Autom. eng. transl.] In recent years, due to the rapid explosion of digital platforms (Statista, 2020), which do not provide control filters and allow anyone to publish content on the Net (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017), the phenomenon of fake news has grown exponentially (Guess et al., 2018) threatening both the foundations of democracy and the role of organizations. For example, according to a recent research by the International Corporate Communication Hub (2022), 40.4% of Italian citizens believe they have come across information at least once which later turned out to be false, and 49.3% say they check always or almost always the information received. In general, according to the results of this research, the issue of spreading fake news is perceived to be as serious as organized crime, and more serious than illegal immigration, especially in the age group between 35 and 54. In fact, four out of ten Italian citizens believe they encounter fake news almost every day (Demopolis Institute, 2021) and a further 27% once or twice a week. In digital spaces, in fact, the so-called echo chambers, i.e. those contexts that lead to the creation of a state of ideological isolation of the individual (Quattrociocchi and Vicini, 2016), are formed starting from two key elements : the confirmation bias and the need to belong. The confirmation bias is based on the cognitive phenomenon that allows users to move in a space characterized by beliefs and opinions that have formed over time; the need to belong translates into the need for the individual to feel free to express his own considerations in a group that will accept and share them. Furthermore, thanks to the presumed anonymity guaranteed by the rules of social media, the contents can spread rapidly without the authorship of what is written being easily attributable to an individual or to a specific organization. Due to the extent of the phenomenon, the issue of fake news has aroused interest both among organizations and among scholars. In recent years, in fact, in the academic debate on business communication, the issue of fake news has been approached by analyzing the ways in which these contents threaten organizations (Berthon et al., 2018), the responses of consumers to the dissemination of fake news (Wisker, 2020) and, finally, the influence of fake news on users' purchase intentions (Visentin et al., 2019). In this contribution, on the one hand, we intend to analyze the phenomenon of fake news by providing a definitional framework and a conceptualization of the topic. On the other hand, adopting the theoretical lens of corporate communication, the chapter examines the risks for companies and strategies to combat the spread of fake news (He and Arris, 2020; Hoekstra and Leeflang, 2020; Wang et al. al., 2020), with particular reference to fake news narratives spread during the recent health emergency. Specifically, in paragraph 2 the theme of fake news is introduced, with a focus on the declination of the phenomenon in a digital environment. Paragraph 3 is dedicated to fake news that attacks organizations: the risks and counter strategies implemented by companies are analysed. Section 4 examines the different narratives of fake news during the Covid-19 pandemic and, finally, the conclusions of the chapter are reported in section 5.