Ricerc@Sapienza

Fake news appear to be one of the most relevant and widespread phenomena characterising media landscape in the last few years, to the point that several fundamental international political and social events, such as the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States of America and the Brexit referendum, are considered to have been strongly influenced by the dissemination of fake contents.

The impact that social media platforms and technology company (search and internet related services) are exerting on online news media is much more relevant than that produced by the first wave of digital transformation, from paper to digital. Companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter and Snapchat are increasingly playing an editorial role in relation to and in competition with traditional publishers.

Racial hoaxes are becoming a popular discursive strategy to disguise racism, as well as a powerful means for triggering waves of fake news and outraged comments both on mainstream and social media. Built on grounds of plausibility and consistency with existing narratives, racial hoaxes may remain latent for a long time, and periodically emerge when negative stereotypes can be framed as actual news stories.

This work explores the connections between fake news and international political commu- nication system, a conglomerate of content and information deriving from the interaction among media, governments and public opinions. Fake news has gained public visibility only in the late years, but some digital phenomena, theorized by Internet scholars before the mainstream explosion of the concept, seem particularly effective to describe fake news as a political weapon.

In recent years the verification of information has become a relevant activity within journalism as a result of the increased circulation of fake news and its ready dissemination via platforms such as social networks. This project seeks to analyse the structure, composition and operation of the independent information verification platforms in Spain and Italy. To this end, different qualitative techniques were used, such as the case study applied to each of the initiatives, in-depth semistructured interviews with its co-founders or managers and web content analysis.

What can we still learn from Hannah Arendt’s political categories and reflections on the public realm in an era that sees the growing spread of populisms? The large critical literature on Arendt’s work has been spreading over the years a sort of standardized vision, according to which Arendt was a nostalgic and anti-modern thinker, whose aim was to rehabilitate the greek polis model against the modern decline of the public sphere, so that very few of her conceptual categories are still useful to understand contemporary phenomena.

What can we still learn from Hannah Arendt’s political categories and reflections on the public realm in an era that sees the growing spread of populisms? Among the large number of current debates, in the age of populist simplification and of the so-called “post-truth”, Arendt's relationship between truth, lying and politics seems to assume particular relevance.