Chapter Ten: Ethical Practices, Digital Citizenship and Communication Futures

One of the key arguments we have been making in this book is that fake news, disinformation and misleading content are not social anomalies that can be eradicated, technological irregularities that can be remedied with automated surveillance and censorship, nor alien practices that are the work of a few bad actors with ill-intent. Rather, we have argued that fake news is constituted in contemporary culture, the product and outcome of the convergence of emergent social and cultural factors including the rise of interactivity and user-generated content production, the dissolution of the authority of former gate-keeping and agenda-setting institutions, the polysemic approach to truth and meaning that comes with living in a postmodern culture, and the embedding of sensationalist and conspiratorial discourses in the media and information ecology. Fake news is, as we have shown, also related to the development of new applications such as the deepfake, new and re-figured practices of marginalisation within populist social and political settings, and the reduction of trust in media discourses and institutions. In short, fake news is a key element at the very core of contemporary communication, one that cannot simply be outlawed or curtailed without changing or refiguring how media and communication operate in contemporary everyday life.