Читать книгу Politics of Disinformation - Группа авторов - Страница 9

The experts predict that in 2022 the citizens of developed countries will be consuming more disinformation than genuine news, because lies are 70% more likely to go viral and be retweeted in comparison with verified information (Vosoughi et al. 2018). It is estimated that 115 fabricated stories favoring Donald Trump were shared on Facebook a total of 30 million times during the 2016 US presidential election (Allcott and Gentzkow 2017). This figure confirms the impact attained by isolated content, disseminated on alternative rather than traditional news channels. This is shaping a dangerous news diet that can generate distrust toward the media and damage the democratic quality of society by encouraging civic apathy, destabilization, chaos (Waisbord 2018), a reduction of pluralism, and a strengthening of polarized communities in which fake news and conspiracy theories are freely propagated. Specialized approaches also warn of a decline of scientific culture in the age of fake news, threatening the scientific and economic progress of Western countries (Elías 2019).

Audiences are conscious of the ambiguity, lack of control, and weakness that accompany the hybrid media system in which such practices have come to maturity. This is why one of their main concerns is the manipulation of journalistic news stories to serve political or economic interests, as the Reuters Institute Digital News Report testified in 2018. This panorama explains why disinformation has become the principal challenge and concern in communication in the twenty-first century, and why its transmedia and cross-border dimension requires public policies and specific training in order to limit its spread.

The scientific community has reacted actively, since academic attention can contribute to sustainable digital development by designing solutions that lead to an innovative society that is also reflexive, responsible, and secure, in the context of an unprecedented transformation in communication patterns. This chapter confirms that studies linked to disinformation have become a fertile and priority line of research. This intensity of production respects the proposal made by the High Level Group on Fake News and Online Information of the European Commission to formulate continuous investigation on the issue in order to evaluate the measures adopted by the different actors.

Mapping recent developments in the scholarship on fake news and misinformation has previously been undertaken in the sphere of health (Wang et al. 2019), selectively in the area of communication (Jankowski 2018; Tandoc et al. 2018), and by applying an interdisciplinary approach that involved disciplines like psychology, economics, and political science as well as communication (Ha et al. 2019), analyzing investigations registered on the databases of Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, and Pubmed. The novelty of the present chapter lies in the breadth of the sample used, since previous review articles had examined between 2 and 142 journal articles.