by Sara Roetman

"Fake news" - and the associated decline of trust in politics, science, and news - is often positioned as one of the greatest threats to democracy today.

This episode explores the broader social and technical shifts that contextualise and are conducive to the rise of disinformation, propaganda, polarisation, and conspiracy. In doing so, we argue that fake news is more than simply a technical problem for social media platforms to crack down on, but is a symptom of a much bigger social crises facing us in the digital age.