What is Fake News?

Abstract

The meaning of the term ‘fake news’ and the extent to which it delineates a real phenomenon have become topics of public, political, and philosophical controversy. Whereas some commentators emphasize the role of social media in the creation and spread of algorithmically tailored misinformation, others highlight the continuities that exist between modern-day ‘fake news’ and other – older – forms of disinformation, such as lying, bullshit, and propaganda. The present chapter reviews extant definitions of the term ‘fake news’, identifies four dimensions that dominate attempts to define what fake news is, and argues that ‘fake news’ is best understood as an exploratory concept which can be clarified only by engaging with the empirical phenomena and dynamics that motivated its introduction in the first place. These, it is argued, are first and foremost systemic aspects of converging social, political, and technological developments, which render existing processes of creating, disseminating, and consuming news reports vulnerable to their exploitation by ‘bad actors’, who (often) intend to pass off their own fabrications as believable and trustworthy news reports.