Social Media and the Post-Truth World Order: The Global Dynamics of Disinformation

Abstract

To what extent can social media affect the knowledge of the truth and how much can it fab-ricate truth? That is the question that Gabriele Cosentino’s book‘Social Media and ThePost-Truth World–The Global Dynamics of Disinformation’attempts to answer. It dis-cusses the topic of post-truth from aglobalperspective.In the six chapters that comprise the text, including the final chapter, the author identi-fies and describes the post-truth world order (Chapter 1) to then examine in the followingchapters examples that he considers emblematic of the global phenomenon of post-truthand of the global dynamics of disinformation. And so, throughout more than one hundredforty pages, Cosentino analyzes the Russian-directed operations in the United States(Chapter 2) to influence the 2016 presidential election. Chapter 3 discusses the so-calledPizzagatephenomenon and theGreat Replacementtheory in connection with conspiracytheories, and Chapter 4 analyzes the 2014 disinformation campaign that Syria and Russialaunched against the search and rescue organization called the White Helmets. Finally,Chapter 5 discusses the current problem of violence against the Rohingya Muslims inMyanmar, fostered by Facebook’s controversial role in facilitating hate speech and disinfor-mation in the country, as well as what happened in Brazil during the 2018 general election,by way of Bolsonaro.