Information disorder, fake news and the future of democracy

ABSTRACT

The terms ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ have lost their shock value in today’s public discourse and seem to have become part of our normal political vocabulary. Fake news, mis- and disinformation are not a problem of a particular country but are found in politics around the world. In this paper, I look at how disinformation appears as a problem for democracy. Empirically, this paper explores dominant patterns of argumentation with a focus on the US, Germany and Czechia. I discuss the themes of media literacy, hybrid warfare and the emergence of fringe media. This paper argues that more attention needs to be paid to the affectual dimension of why people share fake news. Even though there is no easy solution for dealing with fake news, a first step is to stop denouncing people for believing in fake news and putting all our hope in media literacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Disinformation
• post-truth
• Czechia
• Germany
• democracy
• hybrid war

Acknowledgements

This paper has been presented at a virtual colloquium at King’s College London and the IPS-HUB colloquium. I am thankful for the comments by Tony Porter, Stephan Engelkamp, Jan Daniel, Jakub Eberle and Dagmar Rychnovská. Marieke de Goede’s and Emily Gilbert’s probing questions motivated this article. Mary Houck provided invaluable help with the language.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I do not have the space to discuss the results of previous studies in detail. The early study by Alcott and Getzkow, however, gives especially good insight into the methodological difficulties of measuring the impact of ‘fake news’ as well as reasons to be sceptical about its impact.

2 The distinction between factual and normative claims is not always as clear-cut. Contesting this boundary should, however, also be possible in a democratic society.

3 Pretending that distinguishing between fake and non-fake news is an apolitical activity fails to acknowledge how establishing factual truth is always part of the political game. There is a rich tradition in political theory emphasising this aspect of democracies (Dewey, 1999, pp. 31–34; see also Bartenberger, 2015). Indeed, it would be too simplistic to assume that commentators are not aware of this. My discourse analysis of the German debates revealed how commentators are very aware of the fact that in democratic regimes critique against experts is necessary and that identifying fake news is not a ‘neutral’ task.

4 To be more precise: The analysis included texts from July 2016 until June 2018 and from the main German newspapers die Zeit (weekly, liberal), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (daily, conservative leaning) Süddeutsche Zeitung (daily, left-leaning) and the BILD. The BILD is the most sold daily newspaper but it is also the main tabloid paper in Germany.

5 I use quotes as illustrations from that larger study; please refer to (Monsees, 2020) for a detailed account on my methods and the results. In this article, I present the results in different forms by embedding them more strongly in the context of democracy.

6 Interestingly, the article continues with a discussion that this trust cannot be blind. Indeed, the discussion in Germany is in that way rather critical and reflexive of the term fake news. Journalists and other commentators are aware of the fact that a functioning democracy also needs citizens that are in a position to be critical of their authorities. This sentiment can best be described with Adornos term of ‘Erziehung zur Muendigkeit’ which translates something like ‘education to maturity’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by Fritz Thyssen Stiftung.

Notes on contributors

Linda Monsees

Linda Monsees is a senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague. Before joining the IIR she held positions at Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris, Queen Mary University of London and Goethe University Frankfurt. She has worked on encryption, privacy practices and fake news. Her work has been published in Security Dialogue, Internet Policy Review and Critical Studies on Security.