Digital Information Ecosystems

7 Will Fake News Kill Information?

In recent years, the term fake news has become part of common vocabulary. With the development of the Internet and social networks, misinformation has drowned the public, who are finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between what is true and what is false.

Fake news was even crowned word of the year by the famous Collins dictionary in early 2018. The fake news saying began to develop in the 1990s on U.S. television in order to describe “false news, generally exaggerated, disguised as real information”, before exploding in 2015, and even Donald Trump helped popularize it. When questioned by U.S. television in the fall of 2017 on this subject, the President seriously assured that the word “fake was one of the best [he] invented” in his life. “Maybe other people used it in the past, but I never noticed it […]” (Salmon 2017). Since 2016, Collins notes that the use of the term fake news has increased by 365%!

Fake news, taken in its most general sense, covers very different things: on the one hand, there is shared misinformation, where the reader is not aware that it is basically a hoax. Such an example is the satirical Gorafi column, taken up by an Algerian newspaper. El Hayat was indeed tricked, by repeating misinformation on the front page of the newspaper from this parodic site, according to which Marine Le Pen wanted to surround France with a wall paid for by Algeria.

There is also the misinformation intended to propagate political ...