The Progress of Fake News

Fake news is everywhere. While this is not a new phenomenon, nowadays technological advances allow the diffusion of fake news in in ways that were unimaginable a few years ago. This reality is changing the traditional ways of doing politics, political culture, and the political system. The fake news problem is not only a question of technology. The root of the problem is the widespread strategy of spreading misinformation and campaigns of disinformation to obtain political power. In other words, the debate is about how a democracy should orient the technology associated with social media to strengthen, and not weaken, the democracy.

For example, Brazil, the largest democracy in Latin America, elected its president in November 2018. The winner was Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro's popularity grew essentially due to the successful disinformation campaign supported by online social media (Belli, 2018). The followers of Bolsonaro created hundreds of WhatsApp groups to share text messages, images, videos, and memes to spread Bolsonaro's misinforming and misleading content against his political rivals (Belli 2018; Bracho-Polanco, 2019). Brazil is just one more case in a series of countries in which fake news scattered by social networks has been a critical element in social life. In India, the spread of false news has unleashed violence in some areas of the country through inflammatory propaganda expanding Hindu nationalism (Mclaughlin, 2018a). WhatsApp, India's most popular messaging platform, has become a vehicle of misinformation in the election (Ponniah, 2019). In Burma, the army has used Facebook as a tool to help with the ethnic cleansing that caused the death of thousands of people (McLaughlin, 2018b). In the United States, misinformation remains a problem for a variety of social networking platforms (Isaac and Roose, 2018). Recent history shows that the Brexit decision and the triumph of Donald Trump were elections that were won first in the Facebook arena and the rise of Bolsonaro was forged under the shadow of WhatsApp (Nemer, 2018). All these cases evidence how technology interacts with the interests of power groups with the intention of misinforming the population and obtaining favorable results in the electoral process or strengthen a ruler, an ideology, or a political party.