The Free Speech Has Been Hacked. Can We Solve the Problem?
Since the end of 2016 in the journalistic ecosystem, we started talking about fake news and post-truth age.
I personally found fake news a ridiculous fake label, since we have always had problems of disinformation and misinformation, propaganda and hoaxes and so on. Fake news is a contemporary version of an old issue.
Donation of Constantine was a fake document which gave the Catholic Churc ha huge power in the central part of Italy. It took 500 years to discover and prove that it was a fake document. Now, if a piece of fake news is spreading, we can debunk it in a few minutes. Of course, the engagement of fake news is more effective than the debunk, but we can work on that, since like every ecosystem, the media ecosystem contains both preys and predators, both problems and solutions.
Moreover, there is a huge problem with the use of fake news: the problem is that in a while, everybody will accuse everybody else to lie. Everybody is the fake news of someone else. And that’s exactly what is happening.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean that we are not struggling in the media landscape. That’s the reason why we need to be very careful about the terms we use.
