Abstract
“Post-truth”, the 2016 word of the year, has been defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as
“relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public
opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. In fact, the notion risks becoming little more
than a buzzword, given that the epistemic, social, political, and cultural issues at stake behind the
current debate on Post-Truth are so numerous, so differentiated and intertwined. Scholars are thus
required to undertake interpretative efforts in several research directions, in order to understand
both its scope and actual novelty. The paper interrogates one of the main topics debated under
the label of post-truth: the circulation of fake news, that is news stating false facts or events within
a “veridictive” – and not satirical or parodistic – register. By addressing the traditional and
long-lasting debate on the supposed disintermediation of traditional media agencies in the internet
era, the analysis here developed tries to identify and explain the emergence of new dynamics of
intermediation, detectable at the institutional, technological and social levels. The paper focuses on
the new and as yet undetermined role played by the institutional subjects of intermediation, such
as platforms owners and service providers; at the same time, it addresses the ways in which the
space of news circulation is currently shaped by the automatisms of algorithms. In our conclusive
remarks we clarify how these two perspectives should be integrated with a specific focus on the
understudied forms of social consumption of fake news on the internet and through social media.
Lingua originale | English |
---|---|
pagine (da-a) | 448-461 |
Numero di pagine | 14 |
Rivista | Comunicazioni Sociali |
Volume | 2017 |
Stato di pubblicazione | Pubblicato - 2017 |
Keywords
- fake news
- intermediation
- media platform
- newsmaking
- post-truth
- sns algorithms