Chapter Three: The Cultural Emergence of Fake News I: Digital Cultures, Interactive Practices and Artificial Feeds

Although false or misleading communication has been an identified and recognised element of written communication or spoken utterance across the long duration of ‘news’ as a genre of public sphere media, the contemporary idea of ‘fake news’ has emerged in the past half-decade as something which is constituted within and through issues of public anxiety, opening heated debate on questions related to truth and media responsibility, media literacies and of the capabilities of audiences to recognise factuality from deliberate falsehood. It has also been a concept invoked in recent debates on populist electoral outcomes and provoked arguments for political intervention in the context of fake news’ role in providing misleading coverage in parliamentary electoral cycles. This re-emergence of concerns about the veracity of media and digital communication has become situated at the very heart of public debates about social engagement and politics, intersecting other social phenomena such as the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, the surge in interest in the Black Lives Matter movement, and is mentioned in virtually every public discussion about political communication today.