The concepts of ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’ have for a number of years occupied centre stage in the arenas of communication and international politics. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) selected the adjective ‘post-truth’ as its word of the year in 2016, offering this definition: “Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

Fake news is the principal manifestation of the post-truth phenomenon. The Cambridge Dictionary defines ‘fake news’ as “false stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or using other media, usually created to influence political views or as a joke”; a similar definition of the term in the Collins Dictionary (which declared ‘fake news’ its word of the year for 2017) holds that it is “false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting.” The committee of the Australian Macquarie Dictionary , which chose fake news as its 2016 word of the year, described it as “one of the big issues of the year around the world,” capturing “an interesting evolution in the creation of deceptive content as a way of herding people in a specific direction.”

While the success of the expressions post-truth and fake news is recent,¹ the concepts they embody are far from new. The possibility of lying and influencing others with false information, exploiting their emotions and personal beliefs, is as old as communication itself because it is inherent in human nature. Gregory Bateson noted that animals communicate with a simplicity and innocence that humans have lost, noting that “man’s behavior is corrupted by deceit—even self-deceit—by purpose, and by self-consciousness” (Bateson 1972, p. 137). The ability to lie is connected to mankind’s superior cognitive capacity and presupposes a high level of awareness and reflection. These factors render human communication much richer and more versatile than animal communication, but at the same time more opaque, ambiguous, and subject to abuse and deception .

Two of Western civilization’s foundational stories attest to the fact that deceptive communication has always existed. After committing the ‘original sin’ described in the Bible, Adam and Eve clumsily try to hide their transgression from God (Gen.: III, 1–13); shortly thereafter, Cain attempts to deceive his creator by claiming that he is innocent of the murder of his brother Abel (Gen.: IV, 1–10). Homer’s epics, pillars of the other cradle of Western society, Greece, describe the deception by which the Achaean army, inspired by Ulysses, breaches the walls of Troy (Odyssey: VIII, 500–520); today, the expression ‘Trojan horse’ has found its way into the language generally as anything that attempts to deceptively subvert from within; one specific use of the expression in the area of computer technology refers to a type of malware that hides its destructive purposes within an apparently useful or innocuous programme.

It should therefore not be surprising that every era has been rife with fake news. One example is the forged Donation of Constantine, an apocryphal medieval text used to legitimize the temporal power of the church, which was exposed as a fake only many centuries later by the humanist Lorenzo Valla after he discovered historical and linguistic inconsistencies within the document. Others include the campaign of disparagement aimed at the French Queen Marie Antoinette, which doomed her historical reputation and sealed her tragic fate (Darnton 2017); the exaggerated Ems Dispatch, used by Bismarck to trigger the Franco-Prussian War in 1870; and the documents ingeniously forged by officers of the French general staff to support the accusations of treason levelled against the Alsatian Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus, which, even after their counterfeit origin was revealed, were cited by the far-right intellectual Charles Maurras as a patriotic forgery (Margalit 2017). Some pieces of fake news have identifiable and acknowledged authors, while others are spread through less public means that make them difficult to ascribe to a verifiable source, as was the case with the ‘Great Fear’ that spread through several rural areas of France in the summer of 1789 as the result of unchecked rumours of an aristocratic conspiracy, an imminent foreign invasion, and brigand raids killing farmers and destroying crops. These rumours induced the peasants to arm themselves and rise up against the aristocracy (Lefebvre 1932). In other cases, the invisible hand behind the diffusion of fake news has been unmasked only after many years, as happened in the early 1990s when Russian intelligence executive Yevgeny Primakov conceded that KGB instigated the myth that HIV had been created in a laboratory on the orders of the US government (Riva 2018).

If, therefore, the concepts behind the expressions post-truth and fake news have a long history, what is behind the current rise in interest and alarm that has led to the paradoxical ‘success’ of these two new expressions? Why has there been such an enormous recent increase in the diffusion of fake news that distorts truth, exacerbates divisions, and threatens people’s trust in democratic institutions, politics, and science?

We will first attempt to document the ways in which the notion of post-truth is currently manifesting itself and describe the vast array of phenomena that can be referred to as fake news. We will then attempt to trace some of the principal roots of the concept of post-truth, with the goal of understanding how it came by its present meaning and the extent of the problems it poses. The concept of post-truth is in fact the ripe and poisonous fruit of a tree fertilized and watered by many gardeners: some with good intentions, some with bad intentions, and others without a full understanding of the consequences of their actions. We are aware that not every relevant field or discipline that contributed to the creation of the phenomenon of fake news can be adequately explored here, but we believe that what we can explore here will allow us to take significant steps towards clarifying the meaning and current relevance of both post-truth and fake news.

The use of deception and manipulation in the political and commercial world underwent a rapid acceleration in the twentieth century as a result of three related and mutually reinforcing processes. The first was the refinement and increased diffusion of mass media: newspapers and magazines, radio, cinema, and television. At the same time, for economic and political reasons, these tools became increasingly concentrated in the hands of the state or of massive political and corporate organizations. As early as the 1940s, the sociologist Karl Mannheim described the outline of the problem: on the one hand, mass media had been an essential factor in the “fundamental democratization of society,” while on the other it created exceptionally dangerous concentrations of power with the potential to influence and control populations, a potential that was then being tragically realized by totalitarian regimes (Mannheim 1940).

Second, psychology and sociology continued to develop their understanding of human intentions, motivations, and behaviour throughout the course of the twentieth century. The early works of Le Bon and Freud gave birth to a field of study that is now known as the psychosociology of collective and social phenomena, which investigated these processes in depth. Its teachings were put to use for the purposes of political indoctrination and to satisfy the needs of consumer society, and were subjected to critical analysis, initially by the various strains of the theory of mass society (Bramson 1961; Giner 1976; Gili 2001).

The third essential, and perhaps least investigated, cultural process of the twentieth century that led to the development of post-truth and all that it refers to involves a transformation of the concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’; previously, although these concepts had undergone change, they had always been understood to have a relationship with each other that provided a barrier against manipulative actions and projects. In the twentieth century, these two concepts were subjected to radical scrutiny, for reasons we will discuss below, in the fields of philosophy, social science, and media studies.

The first twenty years of the twenty-first century, as noted by the Macquarie Dictionary, have seen “an interesting evolution in the creation of deceptive content.” This evolution is closely connected to globalization and digital revolution because these intertwined processes have strengthened lying and manipulating in three main directions: a more extensive spreading of lies and more people being deceived, a deeper penetration into public opinion thanks to social media, and a greater speed with which fake news can circulate within the system of communication. It is now far easier to quickly spread fake news while hiding its origins in such a way as to make it very difficult to verify or rebut its truthfulness. Even in cases when fake news is quickly debunked, it has usually already been disseminated around the world several times and produced its damaging effects.

In this book, we consciously chose an approach that emphasizes culture and communication. The reader should not forget, however, that certain structural processes operating in contemporary societies related to the social, economic, and political dimensions of these societies have also contributed to the present crisis relating to truth and reality. These structural processes affect people’s use of reason, that is, their capacity to judge reality, causing them to judge it by more emotional and idiosyncratic means (following the definition of post-truth set forth above). Before describing below the path of our cultural and communicative focus in Chaps. 2, 3, 4, and 5, we briefly describe three of these structural processes: individualization, bureaucratization, and globalization.

Individualization is the process by which people lose, or free themselves from, the web of social relationships that once supported them and bound them together. From a macro-social standpoint, individualization has created a progressively more atomistic society. This process has gained momentum over the last two centuries, and its present-day fruit can be seen in the fact that it has transformed everyone’s personal, and even intimate, life. In his book Risk Society, the sociologist Ulrich Beck observes that “the basic figure of fully developed modernity is the single person” (Beck 1992, p. 122). Accordingly, society is now “the fully mobile society of singles” (ibid.). Beck argues that this society of singles is the direction towards which we are all moving and that this course is irreversible. He believes that this society is the structural outcome of modernity and the attendant developments in the job market:

The form of existence of the single person is not a deviant case along the path of modernity. It is the archetype of the fully developed labor market society. The negation of social ties that takes effect in the logic of the ...