Why is it currently more difficult to recognise The Truth If our knowledge of who we are is much greater than it has ever been? Does being more informed today mean being better informed?
The problem of disinformation has now been positioned as something that seems impossible to comprehend through the current mechanisms of reproduction. As if a kind of collective empathy is developing around the disillusionment of being informed, as if the individual feeling of being more and better informed than ever before entails the collective recognition that more education and a life with more choice paradoxically implies a better understanding of our limitations as a civilisation, a culture and a society.
UnfakingNews is presented with the predisposition to explain, explore and contextualise this new phenomenon in which, together with the semantic umbrella that has been built up over the last few years around the concept of fake news, others appear such as disinformation, post-truth, alternative facts, echo chambers, information bubbles, clickbait or content farms.
In order to understand how we have arrived at the current context, the relationship between the media and technology companies is analysed in a techno-local village in which large corporations have become agents of power at the local level and mirrors of reality at the global level. As a consequence of this artificial symbiosis, we reflect on the relationship between voters and consumers of information, the role of targeted advertising and big data, as well as the consequences that this has had on the media. Marketing Big Brother has for the development and improvement of the democratic quality of our societies.
It is impossible not to try to sketch this scenario from the two major political actors that create, distribute and collide around the information wars of the 21st century, the US and Russia. However, beyond the political component, disinformation has a clear economic objective. With this in mind, the aim is to put a face on the so-called content farms and describe the consequences of both their existence and their success for our information ecosystem.
Raúl Magallón
Professor of Journalism and Audiovisual Communication at the Carlos III University of Madrid.