Ricerc@Sapienza

Fake news are not simply a side effect of communicative overload enabled by digital and social media. By now, they can be considered as a phenomenon rooted in the cultural, technical and business dynamics of our media-system, able to produce deep social effects on individuals and communities. Starting from this assumption, fake news appear as the complex result of the combination of several factors, such as:
- the unstoppable transformation of media as "ubiquitous habitat";
- the users tendency/need to be "always on";
- the activation of communication flows, "technologically determined";
- the growing importance of storytelling, caused by a widespread "narrative turn";
- the emergence of concepts such as "post-truth" and "populism".
All these issues can magnify the spread of fake news and create the conditions for a dystopian situation similar to what Postman described, writing before the internet: "Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much information that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance."
The research project aims to analyse the ways in which fake news participate in the process of social construction of reality and could increase possible effects, such as "cultivation", "agenda setting" or "spiral of silence". Starting from the development of a "dynamic" operational definition and considering the creation and distribution processes of these contents across multiple platforms, a specific focus on fake news consumption is provided. The main goal of the research project is to investigate the social effects of fake news, in terms of influence on the perceptual, cognitive and behavioural dimensions of the individuals. In order to detect the characteristic element of fake news: the audience motivations to consider them as real.