1.1 Post-truth Goes Global
During a speech at a New York summit of the Anti-Defamation League in November 2019, the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, known for his outrageous impersonations such as that of Borat—“the first fake news journalist in history”—for once put on a stern face and delivered a scathing attack against “the greatest propaganda machine in history” created by a handful of Internet companies that he blamed for facilitating hate and violence around the world.1 Baron Cohen criticized the algorithms that curate the information delivered by Internet companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter , which “deliberately amplify content that triggers outrage and fear.” For the British entertainer, by giving a platform to demagogues and bigots who appeal to humans’ worst instincts, by allowing conspiracy theories to be watched billion of times and to travel from the fringes to the center of public discourse, and by letting hateful speech against minorities to run rampant, social media companies are upending the very democratic order of our societies. “Democracy, which depends on shared truths, is in retreat”, lamented Baron Cohen, “autocracy, which depends on shared lies, is on the march.” In a blow to Facebook decision not to fact-check political advertisements and against Mark Zuckerberg’s claim that the main goal of his company is to protect people’s right to free speech, the comedian bitterly joked that “If Facebook were around in the 1930s, it would have allowed Hitler to post 30-second ads on his ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’.” He concluded by advocating the need for holding Internet companies responsible for their content: “It’s time to finally call these companies what they really are – the largest publishers in history.”
Baron Cohen’s tirade against global social platforms was as timely as it was provocative, and it encapsulated many of the grievances and anxieties that over the past few years have emerged in public conversations discussing the relation between social media and politics. After years spent celebrating these technologies as empowering and liberating, the public opinion has now come to realize that when giant private companies give a platform to millions of people worldwide with the main goal of generating engagement, dire consequences can ensue. More broadly, the concerns voiced by the creator of Borat, who knows very well the power of lies and fabrications having made a career on satirical hoaxes and fakes, address one of the most disorienting realizations about the current historical period, increasingly shared by journalists, politicians, academics and concerned citizens alike: we now live in a post-truth 2 world, where emotions and beliefs trump evidence-based arguments, where the distinction between truth and lies has become increasingly blurred, and where the very notion of truth seems to have all but disappeared. Such world, primarily operating on social media , is taking more and more dystopian contours.
In the aftermath of the upsetting outcome of Brexit referendum, which has plunged the UK into prolonged political disorder, and the even more shocking result of US 2016 presidential elections, which propelled Donald Trump , a controversial businessman with a dubious financial record and penchant for lying,3 to the highest political position in the world, scholars and media observers were taken aback by what they saw as an epistemic crisis that had struck at the heart of Western democracies and media systems. Since then, a plurality of analyses and theoretical arguments has been offered to identify and make sense of what has been defined as a ‘post-truth condition.’ Post-truth as a cultural and political condition can be observed in several phenomena that have recently emerged in Western countries, such as the circulation of intentionally or unintentionally misleading or false information via the Internet by and among an increasingly polarized and emotional public opinion; the political communication and influence strategies based on manipulation and deception by State and non-State actors by means of trolls ,4 political bots 5 and other forms of computational propaganda 6; and also in the industry of political marketing relying on cognitive-behavioral science, big data analysis and micro-targeting. These examples of post-truth communications occur in a media and political context, increasingly centered on social media , that has evolved to incentivize such forms of strategic manipulations of citizens and of the public opinion.
However, post-truth is not simply a Western phenomenon, but it is also affecting multiple parts of the world. On-line rumors, Internet hoaxes, Facebook fakes, inflammatory memes , conspiracy theories via anonymous imageboard and disinformation campaigns by Twitter shape and affect political discourses and events across the globe, from Myanmar to Russia , from Syria to Brazil . Still, most discussions of post-truth tend to have a Western-centric focus. British journalist D’Ancona (2017) decries the ‘declining value of truth’ in a political era where emotional narratives are reclaiming primacy in public conversations at the expense of factual and verifiable arguments. In his analysis, D’Ancona locates the source of the problem in the ‘fragility’ of Western democratic institutions and in a crisis of trust suffered by traditional sources of authority and information, such as political parties and the press, which accelerated after the emergence of new media technologies, particularly social media , and was compounded by the 2008 economic recession. American literary critic Kakutani (2018) is equally wary of the emergence of the post-truth era and laments the ‘perfect storm’ of political, cultural and technological factors that have created the condition for the rise of a post-truth politician such as Trump . In her discussion, post-truth appears as a broader societal malaise whose causes are to be traced back to the sociopolitical transformations of the 1960s, to the culture wars that ensued afterward, to the postmodern sensibility questioning grand political narratives, which has now spread from the left to the right of the political spectrum, as well as to the rise in the importance of subjectivity in public conversations, to the detriment of objective truth.
Academics have also grappled with the polymorphic nature of the post-truth problem for a while now. The complex phenomenon is often discussed by analyzing a set of interrelated aspects which recur in many of the accounts and theoretical arguments offered by the scholarly community. Social media are often placed at the center of such discussions, with scholars such as Vaidhyanathan (2018) offering a rather critical assessment of the disruption caused particularly by Facebook on public discourse and political communications. The platform’s economic model, the logic of its algorithm and the psychological incentives it generates are seen as culprits for the problems of political polarization , the ‘siloing’ of users into cognitive and cultural echo-chambers and the circulation of various forms of false information. McIntyre (2018) and Salgado (2018) also engage with the role of social media as drivers of post-truth politics, but through analyses which include, among other things, a discussion of postmodern cultural relativism as antecedent to the current post-truth era. Harsin (2018) also discusses the postmodern epistemic fragmentation of truth as a precondition to the current post-truth era, but similarly to D’Ancona, he emphasizes the declining trust in mediating authorities as the ultimate causal factor behind the deterioration of truth in public discourses.
Academic discussions on post-truth also identify its preconditions in the broader historical transformations of the media systems and of journalism since the 1990s, which have led to increased fragmentation of news outlets along ideological orientations in order to compete for demographic segments and audience attention, to the hybridization of information and entertainment and to the rise of opinion journalism at the expense of factual and investigative reporting. The unique brand of partisan and opinionated journalism that emerged over talk radio (Cosentino (2017) and the ‘pernicious objectivity’ pursued by cable news programs hungry for ratings are considered by D’Ancona (2017) as conducive to the trust crisis currently plaguing legacy news media.
Discussing the issue of political polarization from an American perspective, Benkler et al. (2018) and Bennett and Livingston (2018) identify an asymmetry in such polarization whereby the traditional right-wing media, such as Fox News, and alternative media outlets affiliated with the ‘alt-right ,’7 such as Breitbart News, have a much greater responsibility in the spreading of false or inaccurate information than their liberal competitors. Contributing to such asymmetry is also the emerging ecosystem of subcultural practices that fall under the umbrella term of ‘trolling’ (Marwick and Lewis 2017; Nagle 2017; Hannan 2...