Abstract
The 2020 US presidential election elevated fake news to becoming ‘the news’. This book explores the fake news phenomenon through 29 contributions and almost 400 pages that span the ecology of fake news creation and consumption. It is segmented into sections that explore fake news in politics; journalism, law and policies; social media; the history of fake news; how it is received, and recommended solutions to mitigating fake news creation and propagation. At an overarching level, fake news is presented as a pervasive socio-economic and political phenomenon that relies on technology platforms to expunge an engorged pipeline of content instantly and globally to both a digitally native and digitally dependent audience that is as complacent as it is complicit in absorbing it. The book’s early sections posit that the very term ‘fake news’ has been used as a political propaganda tool, citing the emergence of the term in US presidential elections and Donald Trump’s use of the term in his campaign, with these events heralding the onset of a post-truth era. The growth of native advertising’s sponsored and promoted tags is explored, portrayed as shifting content from authentic to true with consumers showing little resistance in challenging this. The book subsequently explores how news can be depicted as ‘fake’ through analysis of media coverage of highly partisan topics such as abortion where disagreement on contentious topics is portrayed as bias in order to render news stories as fake. A section on Law and Policy explores the particularly topical theme of Facebook and other social media platforms as threats to democratic self-governance, and the notion that structural pathologies in the US media system are as responsible for fake news as those pushing this as a mono-causal explanation for Donald Trump’s ascendance. The use of satire in fake news is explored with a depiction of the satirical political group Yes Men and its humorous fake news activities and by looking into technology platforms such as Reddit, which promote ‘geek masculinity’ with voting behaviour skewed towards the transmission of fake news. Society is depicted as being unable to cope with the onslaught of content that is hurled at it relentlessly, with financial inducements such as ‘clickbait’ promoting an avalanche of fake news creation. The concluding section explores political, social and technological factors and the prevalent approach among content and social media platforms to utilize the entrenched complex sociotechnical apparatus of moderation as panacea, augmented only recently by the removal of advertising content that is deemed to be fraudulent. Concomitant to, or as a result of this, the cure for fake news through agonistic pluralism is depicted as being more dangerous than fake news itself with censorship and suppression being worse efforts to save democracy. This book provides an informative and engaging collection of varying but intertwined contributions on fake news with the reader left with the impression that ultimately, fake news remedies by technology platform providers, legislators and media outlets require the active engagement of an educated population: without this, fake news is unlikely to abate.