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Thales Lelo, Roseli Fígaro

University of São Paulo, , Brazil

In recent years, the literature concerned with the spread of so-called fake news has grown because this notion highlights the uncertainty surrounding the interference of disinformation in elections (e.g. the election of Donald Trump in the US in 2016 and the Brexit referendum that same year) (Gelfert 2018). Scholars initially used this concept in the early 2000s to discuss talk shows that mimicked journalistic discourse to satirize socially relevant topics (for instance, The Daily Show from Comedy Central) (Tandoc Jr. et al. 2018). However, there are currently many studies conceptualizing political disinformation in academic research. Given that representative democracy presupposes a well-informed and rational citizenry to participate in decision-making processes, fake news constitutes a political pathology because it would “poison the well” of the deliberative democracy (Levy 2017).

As the current trend in the scholarly literature on fake news has peaked in parallel with the surge of disinformation in the political environment, the primary focus of this field has centered on developing analytical tools to further studies dedicated to textual specificities, digital infrastructure, and the broader effects of fake news on the public sphere.

In this chapter, we systematize the current scholarly trends regarding fake news to propose a materialistic approach to the issue. We aim to elucidate socio-historical aspects that underpin the ongoing surge of online disinformation but often remain unclear in extant literature. Although public debate surrounding fake news emerges along with the crisis in Western democracy and the rise of the social media platforms, they are connected with profound transformations in capital accumulation cycles. In our opinion, these transformations have modified the informational flux and, consequently, have sustained the prevailing disinformation stream.

We develop our argument based on 25 articles about fake news published in academic journals between 2017 and 2019. During this time, scholarly literature related to political disinformation has significantly expanded. To compose this research corpus, we employed two complementary selection criteria. First, from some of the highest-ranked journals on the SCImago Journal Rank indicator (e.g. New Media & Society ; Digital Journalism ; Inquiry; Information , Communication & Society ), we examined articles related to the subject published in the last three years. We then added highly cited articles related to fake news published in journals that were not previously considered in our list to our sample.

In our categorization, the latest studies in this field should be segmented into descriptive and epistemic efforts to look at fake news. Our classification complements those proposed by Tandoc Jr. et al. (2018) and Egelhofer and Lecheler (2019). Following the literature review outlined in the first section, we advance our materialistic approach to fake news. The main aim is to improve on a previously underdeveloped perspective on our current “disinformation order” (Bennett and Livingston 2018), connected with the ongoing discussions regarding platform capitalism (Srnicek 2018; Sadowski 2020). From a Marxist viewpoint recently covered by this line of studies of platforms, it is necessary to stress the historical transformations that have turned low-quality content into a valuable resource to keep the capital accumulation cycle in full swing. Acknowledging that fake news can be found in even the most celebrated era of the printing press (and, for this reason, cannot be viewed as a “new phenomenon”), we emphasize how journalism is, step by step, aligning itself to the financial parameters of platform conglomerates. As a result, nowadays, fake news is just a cheaper way to attract web traffic (and, consequently, to manufacture data) than journalistic information.