Politics of Disinformation

Moreover, sometimes, fake news may be more appealing than stories from legitimized testifiers since their producers’ primary concern is the fabrication of content with the best viral impact. Consequently, disinformation frequently generates more data to keep the capital accumulation cycle in place. For this reason, the current surge in fake news could be seen as an unforeseen consequence of our prevalent value-creation logic that will probably not be constrained in upcoming years.

In this chapter, we first developed a systematic review of the scholarly literature regarding fake news from 2017 to 2019 to advance our contribution to this ongoing discussion from a materialistic viewpoint (mainly based on the current appropriations of Marxist thought in studies of platforms). From our perspective, the growing body of research about fake news could be distinguished between descriptive and critical approaches, whose primary purposes vary due to the epistemological landscape. The descriptive research, focusing on the characterization, infrastructure, and effects of fake news, aims to debug the term from its common-sense use. This study’s line offers a crucial conceptualization of the notion and outlines some of its material roots (e.g. technological shifts, socio-political environments). Nevertheless, it lacks a macro account of the surge of fake news that clarifies why what we are experiencing now regarding disinformation is linked to broader historical changes.

Different from critical scholars – from whom the term fake news does not depict any real phenomenon but bad ideology – we disagree with completely abolishing the expression just because it has been used as an epistemic weapon by several demagogues worldwide. In our judgment, there is a turning point toward the rise of online disinformation (and, consequently, fake news): the emergence of platform capitalism grounded on data circulation, which maintains an uninterrupted value extraction. Since the value of data, here understood as a “recorded abstraction of the world created and valorized by people using technology” (Sadowski 2019, p. 2), is not grounded in the reliability of the content delivered by users or institutions that produced it, fake news is just a cheaper way to attract the audience to data manufacturing. Accordingly, even journalism has been accommodating to the platform business model with minor resistance (Bell and Owen 2017). By stressing the historical changes in the capital accumulation cycle, we showed that, although fake news had existed in the golden era of the printing press (and especially in tabloid journalism), the economic incentives for its industrial production are now highly valued.

Although the current spread of disinformation pollutes our public sphere, to date, the flawed attempts of intergovernmental entities to impose regulatory boundaries on digital platforms do not allow us to envision a promising future. As Tenove (2020, p. 13) recently showed, because almost all of these companies are based in the US, they are protected by Section 230 of the US 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA), a provision that enables them to “moderate the content that users share on their platforms without being legally responsible for that content.” For our Western democracies, the rise of a “disinformation order” (Bennett and Livingston 2018) with large amounts of appealing and low-quality content creates an inexhaustible attention market to attract users and manufacture their data. Not all of this content can be labeled as fake news or widely circulated. Even when the fabricated news stories are restricted to heavy internet users with extreme partisan views, the payback in terms of data extraction is highly rewarding. Therefore, we can assume that fake news will not quickly disappear from sight despite recurrent governmental and journalistic campaigns to fight against it.

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