Post-Truth and Democracy: a reflection on disinformation mechanisms

Abstract

The abundance of information has brought new challenges to our global digital societies, in such a way that it has become mandatory to speak of a “post-truth world” when we analyse the effects of technology and social media on our daily lives. The indelible mark of this issue has been cemented more and more noticeably in our public space: in 2016 the word of the year was post-truth (Hendricks and Vestergaard, 2019), and, in 2017, it was fake news (Dalkir and Katz, 2020). In this article, we attempt to systematize the main lines of reflection on the issue of disinformation and clarify the concepts associated with it, thus trying to highlight the different axes that constitute the complexity of the phenomenon.