Читать книгу Politics of Disinformation - Группа авторов - Страница 21

Additionally, several scholars have analyzed the social media platforms, the algorithms, and the socio-political environment that set up the dissemination of falsehoods disguised as news. This research is not primarily centered on the characterization of fake news but on the environment surrounding its production and circulation in the public sphere. It discusses how the emergence of programmatic advertising is responsible for the surge of low-quality digital content created to generate income from users’ clicks (Graham 2017; Kshetri and Voas 2017; Braun and Eklund 2019). Since affective charged content usually elicits public engagement on social media, purveyors of fake news have a fertile ground on which to fabricate appealing stories to attract users’ interest (Bakir and McStay 2017). Besides, the socio-political background is taken into account in studies that claim the context-sensitive nature of fake news (Humprecht 2018).

Nevertheless, even this line of research lacks a historical perspective that links the macro changes in capital modes of production and circulation and their impact on the epistemic environment. This further elucidation could explain the financial dynamics behind the social media platforms that foster fake news.