Speaker: Anna Elisabetta Galeotti (Università del Piemonte Orientale). As part of the Polpost Meetings
Abstract: The paper discusses the political effects of disinformation induced by fake news. It will be claimed that the belief-distortion specifically induced by fake news affects democratic politics only marginally, while the influence of partisan affiliation on political disinformation has a deeper impact. Such influence is certainly sustained and amplified by the new media that are feeding and disseminating fake news, but it is an independent phenomenon, ingrained in motivated reasoning. This argument, however, does not imply that the spread of fake news is irrelevant for democracy. Yet, its main threat does not regard the distortion of people’s voting behavior, by twisting their political beliefs, but rather: a) the capacity to affect the agenda setting in the public discourse; b) the opacity caused by unknown agents making use of what has been called the “stealth media”. Moreover, the generalized reference to fake news in public discourse has engendered and deepened a wide distrust of political information relative to politicians’ discourses and traditional or new media, as well as a mistrust of politics and of experts in general. In light of these considerations, the treatment of fake news should not be focused on forms of control of the contents spread by social media, but on issues of source’s transparency and on education.