Social Media and the Post-Truth World Order: The Global Dynamics of Disinformation

To what extent can social media affect the knowledge of the truth and how much can it fabricate truth? That is the question that Gabriele Cosentino’s book ‘Social Media and The Post-Truth World – The Global Dynamics of Disinformation’ attempts to answer. It discusses the topic of post-truth from a global perspective. In the six chapters that comprise the text, including the final chapter, the author identifies and describes the post-truth world order (Chapter 1) to then examine in the following chapters examples that he considers emblematic of the global phenomenon of post-truth and of the global dynamics of disinformation. And so, throughout more than one hundred forty pages, Cosentino analyzes the Russian-directed operations in the United States (Chapter 2) to influence the 2016 presidential election. Chapter 3 discusses the so-called Pizzagate phenomenon and the Great Replacement theory in connection with conspiracy theories, and Chapter 4 analyzes the 2014 disinformation campaign that Syria and Russia launched against the search and rescue organization called the White Helmets. Finally, Chapter 5 discusses the current problem of violence against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, fostered by Facebook’s controversial role in facilitating hate speech and disinformation in the country, as well as what happened in Brazil during the 2018 general election, by way of Bolsonaro.