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President Trump’s predilection for spreading messages of this type through the Twitter social network is a good example. During the election campaign, his messages regarding immigration were propagated with statements such as, “our coun-try has completely lost control of illegal and criminal immigration”; “our country is a divided criminal scenario, and it can only get worse”; “we must stop the criminal, murderous machine that is illegal immigration”; “Clinton wants to flood our country with Syrian immigrants, of whom we know almost nothing. The damage is massive”.

This reality, which currently occupies a large part of scientific analysis, guides the debate toward individual freedom and the threat posed by this situation to the foundations of the democratic system.

According to the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, Mark Leonard, the secret algorithms of large tech-nology companies are determining how we perceive the world and are making it increasingly difficult for people to make conscious decisions (Leonard, 2017).

The degree of influence of the fake news regarding Pope Francis’ alleged support of Donald Trump on the decision-making process of voters is impossible to measure, although some analyses point in that direction (Bharat, 2017).

There seems to be no doubt that the message is deliberately designed to emotionally challenge the electorate and influence the freedom of choice of voters, given that we tend to consider the vision that matches our feelings to be true. When we believe that something must be true, we nearly always find cases in which it is true, or people who believe it (Lippmann, [1922] 2003: 131-136). Therefore, post-truth introduces us to the field of a subjective perception of reality in which beliefs and individual convictions outweigh the objectivity of facts.

Even when facts highlight the error of a belief, human beings tend not to doubt that belief, but instead doubt the facts that question their beliefs. This phenomenon was described by Festinger, Riecken and Schacter in the work entitled, When Prophecy Fails, in which the following appears: “A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point” (Festinger, Riecken, & Schacter, 1956).

Shortly thereafter, Leon Festinger formulated the “Theory of Cognitive Dissonance” (A cognitive dissonance, 1957), in which he explains the psychological mechanism that is triggered in human beings who face a conflict –dissonance– be-tween their beliefs and the facts, and who try to interpret those facts in a manner that is consistent with their opinions.

This defence mechanism might lead human beings to devise explanations or use reasoning that eliminates inconsistencies and reinforces their convictions to the detriment of objective data.

3. Brief note about Brexit

In our opinion, the result of the Brexit referendum cannot be attributed exclusively to the influence of Smart Data tech-nologies employed by Cambridge Analytica, but rather to the success that these have had by being used in a climate of Euroscepticism that is widespread in British society.

Therefore, the social context of post-truth is not limited to the temporary time frame of the referendum, but rather to a situation that has been fed for a long time in order for these messages to grow.