Politics of Disinformation. Группа авторов
regarding the presumed adverse effects of fake news on the public sphere. Broader studies about the spread of false stories have shown that this type of content circulates much less than expected, even during elections (Allcott and Gentzkow 2017). Vargo et al. (2018) also demonstrated that fake news influenced the agenda of only the alternative right-wing media in the US media landscape from 2014 to 2016.
Until now, some studies have suggested that the circulation of fake news is often limited to individuals who are highly committed to burning social issues. That is, engagement with fake news content is restricted to a subset of heavy internet users with a high availability for media consumption (Nelson and Taneja 2018). Partisanship has been considered a particularly potent moral disposition that separates people from factual information, especially when that information challenges their initial preferences. Therefore, demagoguery could be more appealing for a few citizens than factual and accurate information, especially when it reinforces their pre-existent worldviews (Barrera et al. 2020). Scholars have argued that individuals who are susceptible to trusting political elites (Van Duyn and Collier 2018) are more likely to believe in fake news. Likewise, the more partisan a citizen is, the more likely they are to consider themselves and their comrades impervious to disinformation (Jang and Kim 2018).
However, even research connecting fake news with the older phenomenon of partisanship lacks a concern with the material conditions that increase the circulation of disinformation in unstable political contexts. Although political elites’ propagandistic use of social media platforms to circumvent journalism contributes to our epistemic environment’s pollution, we argue that this situation was only possible due to changes in the capital accumulation cycle.
Epistemic Critical Approaches
Conversely, the last of the current approaches to fake news has been the claiming of the term’s abandonment, arguing that it has been used as a discursive weapon by authoritarian governments to thwart freedom of expression, to cover up “bad ideology” (Habgood-Coote 2018). Albeit from a critical perspective, these scholars move away from all descriptive approaches since they consider fake news to be either an “epistemic slur” (Habgood-Coote 2018) or a “floating signifier” (Farkas and Schou 2018) usually evoked to undermine trust in democracy and the press. Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, other demagogues worldwide have been blaming their critics (mainly from mainstream news media) for conveying fake news. Juridical efforts to pass “fake news laws” to fight against online disinformation have come under criticism regarding their insufficient definition of fake news (Coady 2019). As a result, these laws could be exploited by elites to curtail government opposition.
Epistemic criticism of the scholarly literature about fake news revolves around negating any real phenomenon behind the term. Although we could follow the historical roots of propaganda and disinformation, fake news would not have a stable meaning that would allow scholars to base their research on it. Thus, critics of fake news conceptualization argue that there is no feasible way to advance a descriptive approach without being trapped in undemocratic purposes. Nevertheless, even though we agree that the term fake news has been used as a discursive artifice to undermine public dissent, we also contend that this notion cannot be erased for this reason alongside other disputed and loaded words (for instance, communism, racism, and populism). From our viewpoint, fake news is profoundly related to structural transformations in the capital accumulation process and needs to be addressed in this way to be fully understood.
Platform Capitalism and the Fabric of Fake News
To contribute to the extant literature regarding fake news, we delve into a broader critical approach based on materialistic contributions recently covered by studies of platforms. These studies, grounded in Marxism (in particular, its thesis related to capital circulation) (Marx 1990), grasp today’s increasing financialization. We base ourselves on the previous conceptualization of fake news as counterfeit information dressed up as news content, but we try to complement that definition in a direction close to the infrastructural perspective. Nevertheless, as we pointed out earlier, in our view, even that approach lacks an emphasis of the broader historical transformations that paved the way to the current state of affairs (a trend also observed in experimental studies regarding alleged fake news effects). We need to grasp the shifts in the means of production due to technological developments and how they have been appropriated to favor platform companies. Fake news represents the most visible face of unrestricted circulation in pursuit of data.
Shifts in the Capital Accumulation Cycle
From our perspective, it is impossible to split the rise of online disinformation from the current platform capitalism and its links to global chains of production. As Friedman (2006) suggests, in the past, the high transaction costs to transport goods and information on a global scale made the coordination of different factories in a global chain impracticable. Concentrating the manufacturing process in a single plant or close to that ideal was a naturally cheaper decision. Nevertheless, with the rise of globalization, transaction costs have dropped due to improvements in computing and communication technologies. As a result, globally unbundling the production chain became attractive to several companies, generating a “flat world” (Friedman 2006), i.e. a world unlimited to capital expansion.
The primary accumulation process until the 1950s, based on the value extraction of physical commodities, was gradually replaced by the digital technologies of data mining (Sadowski 2019). Rahman and Thelen (2019) stated that the shift towards data financialization was an advancement of the neoliberalist venture capitalism that was typical in the 1980s. The politico-economic context that benefited these developments rests in the permissive jurisdictions, supportive legal regime, and the financialized business sector in the US (the country that pioneered the platform business model and spread it globally) (Rahman and Thelen 2019).
Platform companies now rein in these global chains because the value of information as data can be extracted in two ways. On the one hand, they can encourage user connections and personal content circulation that benefit their economic interests as data accumulators. The content produced by users enhances the infrastructural nature of these platforms as necessary mediators of the users’ online presence. On the other hand, platforms collect data traits with or without user consent, converting it into more data – a process called “datafication” (Mejias and Couldry 2019). Thus, this raw material goes through a “data mining” procedure. As a result, it is packaged and sold to “data buyers (advertisers and data brokers) and platform service providers” (Mejias and Couldry 2019, p. 5). To sum up, users’ data are the raw material that generates trade commodities for value extraction.
Since platform companies do not produce what they sell – that is, users’ data – all of the material infrastructure involved in this business model (e.g. cables, energy, and satellites) guarantees the maintenance of platform capitalism (Srnicek 2018). In this process of production and circulation (Marx 2015), commodities are valued as long as they can generate more aggregate data from users. Circulation is a founding aspect of making capital from money. Platform companies accelerate this process by the model of monetizing the extraction of data from users. Fake news is the showcase that works to attract more public to produce more data. This subgenre of disinformation therefore has a significant value in the logic of platform capitalism.
Currently, global chains involving platform companies (viz Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft) require free circulation of data without any regulatory mechanisms to protect users’ privacy and to maintain geopolitical security. As an improvement in the deregulation groundwork of neoliberalism, platform capitalism takes advantage of the fact that intergovernmental organizations (for instance, the World Trade Organization) have historically favored their influential members’ commercial interests in political and economic aspects, spreading them globally. Accordingly, international legislation and multilateral pacts often sidestep any attempts to regulate the informational flux. As scholarly literature shows (Srnicek 2018; Sadowski 2019, 2020), the most harmful consequence is the monopolization of collective wisdom into market secrets (encapsulated right now in enigmatic algorithms).
The Downgrade