Nota_investigacion_EN_Doxa_27

As such, the individual has overcome this inability by creating cognitive “pseudo environments”, or in other words, “rep-resentations of the environment”, which allow him to form a complete yet “fictitious” image of those aspects of the world of which he has no direct experience.

In the chapter entitled “The World Outside and the Pictures in our Heads”, Lippmann explains that most of the knowledge about the external world does not come from direct experience by the individual, but from the account that other people have made of that external world.

The warning of risk by these authors results from this situation in which the democratic system is based on the inexperi-enced decisions of the average man who is questioned about issues for which he has no answers, and for which he can only decide arbitrarily, according to his emotions and feelings.

This is the reason why authors such as Lippmann emphasized the social role of the press as a tool in shaping public opin-ion, and he went so far as to say that strictly speaking, the current crisis of democracy is a crisis of its journalism (Lippmann, [1920] 2011: 7).

The current problem of misinformation and the so-called fake news represents an old threat to the shaping of public opin-ion. Walter Lippmann had already defined propaganda as an activity consisting of a group of men capable of preventing people from knowing the facts in a direct way, and who can manipulate news related to those facts in order to adapt that news to their own purposes (Lippmann, [1922] 2003: 51).

It is a fact that the Eurobarometer of April 2018 published the unsettling statistic that 37% of Europeans claim to receive at least one piece of fake news each day, and for 31% of this same group it occurs once per week; simultaneously, 83% of Europeans consider fake news to be a threat to democracy.

These symbolic messages are characterized by strong emotional content and are thrown into the public sphere in highly polarized social contexts under the guise of journalistic information.

Although the reasons that explain the political events that occurred in 2016 are very complex and cannot be reduced to a single cause (the financial crisis that began in 2008, the social injustice resulting from the difficulties of survival for the most disadvantaged social classes, citizen disaffection toward the political and economic elite, globalization, and evidently, the influence of social networks in our digital society), the influence of disinformation campaigns may have played a decisive role in the oscillations of public opinion.

Facebook has recently admitted that 126 million Americans received fake news during the election campaign (Washing-ton Post, 2017). We have also learned that “Russian trolls” published more than 80,000 entries on Facebook between 2015 and 2017.

According to the information available, those entries were originally seen by 29 million Americans, but Facebook has es-timated that it reached 40% of the total population. Moreover, the media has already started talking about “victims” (La Nación, 2017).

At times, symbolic messages come from known issuers who have the ability to introduce messages based on false data or value judgments into the public debate.