Fake news is as old as the tabloid press, but in the online world fake news can spread quickly, can be individually targeted, and it is often hard to distinguish if online behaviour in the context of fake news is conducted by humans or algorithms. Right-wing movements try to make use of social media for spreading their propaganda and challenging socialist and liberal political positions and worldviews online. They not just use bots and traditional lobbying methods online, but often also resort to threats, bullying, and hate speech.
Bourgeois media often, but not exclusively spread ideology. In section three, we have already seen an example of how nationalist and xenophobic ideology is spread online. Ideology on the Internet tends to be visual and tabloidised. It makes use of strategies such as simplification, the use of only a few words, emotionalisation, scandalisation, polarisation, banalisation, manipulation, fabrication, etc. User-generated ideology means that the labour of producing ideology is not confined to professional ideologues, but has penetrated everyday life. Ideologies are sensational, populist, simplistic, emotional, and directly address particular groups. Algorithms amplify the views of those who gain high levels of attention. As a consequence, we find the online tendency of the algorithmic amplification of online ideologies.
The actions of corporations, celebrities, and political elites result in the colonisation of the public sphere. These processes also operate in the online world and on social media, where targeted advertising, algorithms, big data, political bots, fake online news, digital surveillance, and other mechanisms are used and result in the corporate and political stratification of the Internet.
Fake news has been challenged by developments such as fact-checking organisations and the quest for building a public service Internet that consists of non-commercial platforms that do not have a for-profit imperative but want to benefit the public by reliable news, information, and educational resources that are provided online and engage users (Fuchs 2018a, 2018b).
In the next section, we will see that communication technologies are not just a medium for the communication and challenging of reified thought, but also form an object of reification. Lukács’ work will be used for showing how one can analyse ideologies of the Internet and digital media.
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Theorists