AUTHOR=Pira Francesco 

TITLE=Disinformation a problem for democracy: profiling and risks of consensus manipulation

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Sociology

VOLUME=Volume 8 - 2023

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2023.1150753

DOI=10.3389/fsoc.2023.1150753

ISSN=2297-7775

ABSTRACT=Zuboff states regarding the formation of new powers at the birth of what he calls "surveillance capitalism" (2019), that it arises from the act of digital dispossession, where human experience is subjugated to market mechanisms. 
In a previous work, we tried to reflect on how digital society could offer an ideal framework to stimulate the growth of social capital (Pira, 2021), if individuals were able to equip themselves with those interpretive tools that would allow them to contribute, precisely, to the creation of social capital. 
Building on the conclusions of that work, the interest is to analyze in the post-pandemic, in this era of technological wars, how platformization and the opacity that characterizes it can generate manipulative effects on the dynamics of consensus building. We are now in the era of the self informative programme; the hierarchical dimension of sources has vanished which has been matched by the collapse of the authority, credibility and trustworthiness of classical sources. The user creates, his own informative programme, which gives rise to a new relationship between digital individuals. 
With this frame in mind, we intend to analyze the narrative of this post-pandemic phase proposed by mainstream media, using the tool of the fake news hexagon, to verify the impact and spread through the social network where emotionalism, hate speech and polarization are accentuated. In fact, the definition of the fake news hexagon was the starting point to study through a predefined method the dynamics of proliferation in order to activate correct identification and blocking tools, in line with what is defined in the Digital Transformation Institute's manifesto 
Platforms drive the process of identity construction within containers that adapt to the demands of individuals, leading toward a flattening out and the search for answers that follow the principle of confirmation bias. Moving toward an increasing lack of recognition of the other, the individual moves away from commitment, from sacrifice in virtue of achieving a higher collective good.