Professor Jo Fox, Newcastle University
Disinformation; misinformation; troll-factories; data-mining; hackers; bots; echo chambers; deep-fakes; meme-warfare; click-bait; catfish; pre-bunking; post-truth; fake news. Since 2016, the year of the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump, we have invented a whole new lexicon to describe what is happening to our media environment. But how new is the concept of ‘fake news’, and what might we learn from the past to help us to understand it? This lecture will explore how propaganda in its many forms works, why it is an inherently human behaviour, and how we confront one of the most complex societal challenges of our time.