In short, it deals with a wide range of practices that manipulate public opinion on the internet, which goes beyond publishing fake news.

However, it is essential to acknowledge that the heart of the matter of fake news (and post-truth culture if there is such a thing) does not lie in the traditional media but the recent proliferation of ideologically polarized websites and social networks. In recent years there has been an “explosion of fake news, phagocytized by social media, namely Facebook” and other social media sites. Viralising fake news, which looks like real news, and sharing it as if it were real news. Thus, fake news is viralized on social networks much more quickly than accurate and contrasted information. A study by the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, published in the Science journal by Vosoughi, Roy, and Aral (2018: 1148), analyzed around 126 000 news threads on Twitter between 2006 and 2017 tweeted over 4.5 million times by 3 million people.

The results were disappointing. In the authors’ words, the truth takes about six times longer than a lie to reach 1500 people. Fake content spreads significantly further, more quickly, and is more profoundly inserted in the threads and conversation cascades than true news. Among all the categories of hoaxes, those related to politics are disseminated more widely than those connected to terrorism, natural disasters, science, financial information or urban legends.