Fake News, Reality, and Information Perception in the Digital Era

Persefoni Zeri, Panteion University Charalambos Tsekeris, National Center of Social Research Fake News, Reality and Information Perception in the Digital Era “In the cave allegory”, says Arendt, “Plato offers no explanation of the perverse love of the lifelong prisoners of the cave for deception and falsehood” (H. Arendt, Truth and Politics, 2000: 547). During the 2020 US Elections, doubts arise once more about the collective capacity of a contemporary democratic society to differentiate between truth and lies or the party fiction, false narratives of partisan media from accurate or objective information. The motivating lie about “stolen election” and the voter fraud narrative, cultivated by an insular conservative media ecosystem and propagated by Trump and the Republican party (Benkler et al., Mail-in Voter Fraud, 2020), have actually worked, and 76 % of the Republican voters have accepted the lie and supported the Capitol siege (Donovan/Faris, 19.01.2021). However, in the new era of the digital communication platforms and the new techniques of virality and simulation, which render the understanding of the factual world highly uncertain, the variety of inherent psychological mechanisms are associated with the difficulties the individuals have to reflect about the truth and the amplification of the ideological filter bubbles. In a first step, this study, based on selected events of the everyday Greek life, will attempt to investigate the way the facts are perceived, interpreted and understood by social groups that share characteristics of an ideological filter bubble. It will then follow an empirical research that involves young Greek students, aged between 19 and 22, and will explore how they perceive selected political and social topics. This will precede a questionnaire concerning the online and offline news media use by the research participants, in order to highlight the extent to which the respondents are interested in important public issues, given that the informed citizen pertains to an essential condition for a democratic society.