Читать книгу Politics of Disinformation - Группа авторов - Страница 23

Conversely, the last of the current approaches to fake news has been the claiming of the term’s abandonment, arguing that it has been used as a discursive weapon by authoritarian governments to thwart freedom of expression, to cover up “bad ideology” (Habgood-Coote 2018). Albeit from a critical perspective, these scholars move away from all descriptive approaches since they consider fake news to be either an “epistemic slur” (Habgood-Coote 2018) or a “floating signifier” (Farkas and Schou 2018) usually evoked to undermine trust in democracy and the press. Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, other demagogues worldwide have been blaming their critics (mainly from mainstream news media) for conveying fake news. Juridical efforts to pass “fake news laws” to fight against online disinformation have come under criticism regarding their insufficient definition of fake news (Coady 2019). As a result, these laws could be exploited by elites to curtail government opposition.

Epistemic criticism of the scholarly literature about fake news revolves around negating any real phenomenon behind the term. Although we could follow the historical roots of propaganda and disinformation, fake news would not have a stable meaning that would allow scholars to base their research on it. Thus, critics of fake news conceptualization argue that there is no feasible way to advance a descriptive approach without being trapped in undemocratic purposes. Nevertheless, even though we agree that the term fake news has been used as a discursive artifice to undermine public dissent, we also contend that this notion cannot be erased for this reason alongside other disputed and loaded words (for instance, communism, racism, and populism). From our viewpoint, fake news is profoundly related to structural transformations in the capital accumulation process and needs to be addressed in this way to be fully understood.