Post-truth, denialism and fake news: Introductory essay
Estudos de Sociologia, Araraquara, v. 28, n. esp. 1, e023003, 2023. e-ISSN: 1982-4718
DOI: https://doi.org/10.52780/res.v28iesp.1.18303 8
What is false in fake news?
The dissemination of “fake news” intensified from the middle of the last decade with
the Brexit campaign, the elections in the United States in 2016 and, in Brazil, the electoral
process of 2018. These events, by the way, allow a more or less general characterization of the
phenomenon. According to Sampaio, “fake news are news that are false, invented, altered,
distorted, removed from its original contexts” (SAMPAIO, 2022, p. 134, our translation). From
this, he extracts some characteristics: 1) for them to be presented as news (even if false), they
do not need to present a format that imitates the journalistic format; they are still, usually, based
on a logic of presenting novelties based on “facts”, however invented or distorted; 2) fake news
gains reliability through confirmation bias, that is, its reliability in pre-existing beliefs and
perspectives or even in fears, anxieties, conspiracy theories and prejudices; 3) fake news is an
intrinsically digital phenomenon. The second feature is related to what was said above about
the fact that post-truth is not another kind of truth. It can even be said that fake news is not
news; they are, rather, simulacra of news. More important, however, is to understand in what
sense they are false. In an obvious sense they are false, because they do not correspond to facts.
But since fake news are produced to produce deception, it becomes irrelevant that they do not
correspond to facts. On the contrary, it is as if they simultaneously produced the facts they
reported. While fact-checking is an important mechanism to combat fake news, it does not
entirely solve the problem. This is not only due to not reaching the same number of individuals
exposed to original false content and due to confirmation bias, which makes people themselves
resist the correction of information. Sampaio recalls the following:
In its alternative and distorted sense, fake news is a term used by politicians
or extremist groups to disqualify media vehicles, usually professional
journalism, that provide negative coverage of the political group in question.
This disqualification happens for the promotion of alternative means of
communication, usually digital, directed at specific party groups and militants,
which do not have filtering or mediation by these media actors. These parallel
channels tend to be precisely those that help spread fake news in its original
sense (SAMPAIO, 2022, p. 135, our translation).
I believe that it is only possible to understand what is false in fake news by
understanding its ideological character. As Stahl recalls, ideology in the Marxian sense denotes
“cognitive flaws in intellectual phenomena (that is, in the intellectual relations of individuals
with reality)” (STAHL, 2020, p. 215, our translation). More specifically, it is an “ideological
cognitive relationship of individuals with social reality not because ideology cognitively
reproduces this reality in a false way, but because it assumes that ideology is the adequate