The History and Theory of Post-Truth Communication (2020) PDF

The History and Theory of Post-Truth Communication Giovanni Maddalena Guido Gili The History and Theory of Post-Truth Communication  Giovanni Maddalena Guido Gili The History and Theory of Post-Truth Communication Giovanni Maddalena Guido Gili Univer...

The History and Theory of Post-Truth Communication Giovanni Maddalena Guido Gili The History and Theory of Post-Truth Communication  Giovanni Maddalena Guido Gili The History and Theory of Post-Truth Communication Giovanni Maddalena Guido Gili University of Molise University of Molise Campobasso, Italy Campobasso, Italy ISBN 978-3-030-41459-7    ISBN 978-3-030-41460-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41460-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. 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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland  Contents 1 What Are We Talking About?  1 References  9 2 Post-Truth in Practice 11 2.1 Who’s Speaking (But Really)? 13 2.2 The Rigged Game of Framing 16 2.3 Words That Obscure Facts 18 2.4 The Creation of Pseudo-Events 21 2.5 Factoids: Media Hallucinations That Modify Reality 23 2.6 Lies, Omissions, and Much More 25 2.7 A Typology of Fake News 29 References 31 3 Post-Truth in Theory 35 3.1 Understanding (and Exploiting) Human Motives 36 3.1.1 The Mob Mentality 36 3.1.2 War and Totalitarian Regimes: The Grand Laboratory 39 3.1.3 Selling Ideas on the Market 40 3.1.4 The Homogenization of Mass Society 40 3.2 The Critique of Truth 46 3.2.1 Truth and Truths: Developments in Philosophy 47 3.2.2 From Social Order to Communicative Order: Developments in Sociology 50 v vi Contents 3.2.3 Performance and Framing: Developments in Communication Studies 54 3.2.4 Journalistic Narration as Construction of Reality: Developments in Journalism Studies 61 3.2.5 Gains and Losses of Constructivism 64 References 68 4 The Backlash and Side Effects 73 4.1 New Entrants into the Media 74 4.1.1 Unwelcome Protagonists: New Heroes and New Armies 74 4.1.2 Disintermediation: New Rules of Engagement 75 4.1.3 Infiltrating the Network: Circumvention 76 4.2 Disillusionment About the Emancipative Power of the Media 77 4.3 From Selective Reception to the Echo Chamber 80 4.4 Truth as a Product You Can Buy 82 References 85 5 The Future of Post-Truth: Defences, Defended, and Defenceless 89 5.1 Who Is Most Vulnerable? 90 5.1.1 The Desire to Believe 90 5.1.2 Not Me! The Third-Person Effect 91 5.1.3 The Peripheral Route of Attention 92 5.1.4 Conspiracy Theories 93 5.2 Three Strategies to Defend Yourself from Manipulation 95 5.2.1 Cultivating Critical Thought 95 5.2.2 Back to Reality. Which Reality? 97 5.2.3 A Proposal of Rich, Relational Realism 98 References103 Index107  CHAPTER 1 What Are We Talking About? Abstract In this chapter, we present a few definitions of post-truth and explain why the human capacity for lying and influencing others with false information, which is not new in human history, has given birth to alarm- ing new dangers in recent years. We also set forth our path for describing the history and theoretical claims underlying the phenomenon of post-­ truth, accounting briefly for the social, political, and economic changes posed by individualization, bureaucratization, and globalization issues that will not be addressed in the remainder of the book. Keywords Deceptive communication Human nature Individualization Bureaucratization Globalization The concepts of ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’ have for a number of years occupied centre stage in the arenas of communication and international politics. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) selected the adjective ‘post-truth’ as its word of the year in 2016, offering this definition: “Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Fake news is the principal manifestation of the post-truth phenomenon. The Cambridge Dictionary defines ‘fake news’ as “false stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or using other media, usually created to © The Author(s) 2020 1 G. Maddalena, G. Gili, The History and Theory of Post-Truth Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41460-3_1 2 G. MADDALENA AND G. GILI influence political views or as a joke”; a similar definition of the term in the Collins Dictionary (which declared ‘fake news’ its word of the year for 2017) holds that it is “false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting.” The committee of the Australian Macquarie Dictionary, which chose fake news as its 2016 word of the year, described it as “one of the big issues of the year around the world,” cap- turing “an interesting evolution in the creation of deceptive content as a way of herding people in a specific direction.” While the success of the expressions post-truth and fake news is recent,1 the concepts they embody are far from new. The possibility of lying and influencing others with false information, exploiting their emotions and personal beliefs, is as old as communication itself because it is inherent in human nature. Gregory Bateson noted that animals communicate with a simplicity and innocence that humans have lost, noting that “man’s behav- ior is corrupted by deceit—even self-deceit—by purpose, and by self-­ consciousness” (Bateson 1972, p. 137). The ability to lie is connected to mankind’s superior cognitive capacity and presupposes a high level of awareness and reflection. These factors render human communication much richer and more versatile than animal communication, but at the same time more opaque, ambiguous, and subject to abuse and deception. Two of Western civilization’s foundational stories attest to the fact that deceptive communication has always existed. After committing the ‘origi- nal sin’ described in the Bible, Adam and Eve clumsily try to hide their transgression from God (Gen.: III, 1–13); shortly thereafter, Cain attempts to deceive his creator by claiming that he is innocent of the murder of his brother Abel (Gen.: IV, 1–10). Homer’s epics, pillars of the other cradle of Western society, Greece, describe the deception by which the Achaean army, inspired by Ulysses, breaches the walls of Troy (Odyssey: VIII, 500–520); today, the expression ‘Trojan horse’ has found its way into the language generally as anything that attempts to deceptively subvert from within; one specific use of the expression in the area of computer technol- ogy refers to a type of malware that hides its destructive purposes within an apparently useful or innocuous programme. It should therefore not be surprising that every era has been rife with fake news. One example is the forged Donation of Constantine, an apoc- ryphal medieval text used to legitimize the temporal power of the church, which was exposed as a fake only many centuries later by the humanist Lorenzo Valla after he discovered historical and linguistic inconsistencies within the document. Others include the campaign of disparagement  1 WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT? 3 aimed at the French Queen Marie Antoinette, which doomed her histori- cal reputation and sealed her tragic fate (Darnton 2017); the exaggerated Ems Dispatch, used by Bismarck to trigger the Franco-Prussian War in 1870; and the documents ingeniously forged by officers of the French general staff to support the accusations of treason levelled against the Alsatian Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus, which, even after their counterfeit origin was revealed, were cited by the far-right intellectual Charles Maurras as a patriotic forgery (Margalit 2017). Some pieces of fake news have iden- tifiable and acknowledged authors, while others are spread through less public means that make them difficult to ascribe to a verifiable source, as was the case with the ‘Great Fear’ that spread through several rural areas of France in the summer of 1789 as the result of unchecked rumours of an aristocratic conspiracy, an imminent foreign invasion, and brigand raids killing farmers and destroying crops. These rumours induced the peasants to arm themselves and rise up against the aristocracy (Lefebvre 1932). In other cases, the invisible hand behind the diffusion of fake news has been unmasked only after many years, as happened in the early 1990s when Russian intelligence executive Yevgeny Primakov conceded that KGB instigated the myth that HIV had been created in a laboratory on the orders of the US government (Riva 2018). If, therefore, the concepts behind the expressions post-truth and fake news have a long history, what is behind the current rise in interest and alarm that has led to the paradoxical ‘success’ of these two new expres- sions? Why has there been such an enormous recent increase in the diffu- sion of fake news that distorts truth, exacerbates divisions, and threatens people’s trust in democratic institutions, politics, and science? We will first attempt to document the ways in which the notion of post-­ truth is currently manifesting itself and describe the vast array of phenom- ena that can be referred to as fake news. We will then attempt to trace some of the principal roots of the concept of post-truth, with the goal of understanding how it came by its present meaning and the extent of the problems it poses. The concept of post-truth is in fact the ripe and poison- ous fruit of a tree fertilized and watered by many gardeners: some with good intentions, some with bad intentions, and others without a full understanding of the consequences of their actions. We are aware that not every relevant field or discipline that contributed to the creation of the phenomenon of fake news can be adequately explored here, but we believe that what we can explore here will allow us to take significant steps towards 4 G. MADDALENA AND G. GILI clarifying the meaning and current relevance of both post-truth and fake news. The use of deception and manipulation in the political and commercial world underwent a rapid acceleration in the twentieth century as a result of three related and mutually reinforcing processes. The first was the refinement and increased diffusion of mass media: newspapers and maga- zines, radio, cinema, and television. At the same time, for economic and political reasons, these tools became increasingly concentrated in the hands of the state or of massive political and corporate organizations. As early as the 1940s, the sociologist Karl Mannheim described the outline of the problem: on the one hand, mass media had been an essential factor in the “fundamental democratization of society,” while on the other it cre- ated exceptionally dangerous concentrations of power with the potential to influence and control populations, a potential that was then being tragi- cally realized by totalitarian regimes (Mannheim 1940). Second, psychology and sociology continued to develop their under- standing of human intentions, motivations, and behaviour throughout the course of the twentieth century. The early works of Le Bon and Freud gave birth to a field of study that is now known as the psychosociology of collective and social phenomena, which investigated these processes in depth. Its teachings were put to use for the purposes of political indoctri- nation and to satisfy the needs of consumer society, and were subjected to critical analysis, initially by the various strains of the theory of mass society (Bramson 1961; Giner 1976; Gili 2001). The third essential, and perhaps least investigated, cultural process of the twentieth century that led to the development of post-truth and all that it refers to involves a transformation of the concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’; previously, although these concepts had undergone change, they had always been understood to have a relationship with each other that provided a barrier against manipulative actions and projects. In the twen- tieth century, these two concepts were subjected to radical scrutiny, for reasons we will discuss below, in the fields of philosophy, social science, and media studies. The first twenty years of the twenty-first century, as noted by the Macquarie Dictionary, have seen “an interesting evolution in the creation of deceptive content.” This evolution is closely connected to globalization and digital revolution because these intertwined processes have strength- ened lying and manipulating in three main directions: a more extensive spreading of lies and more people being deceived, a deeper penetration  1 WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT? 5 into public opinion thanks to social media, and a greater speed with which fake news can circulate within the system of communication. It is now far easier to quickly spread fake news while hiding its origins in such a way as to make it very difficult to verify or rebut its truthfulness. Even in cases when fake news is quickly debunked, it has usually already been dissemi- nated around the world several times and produced its damaging effects. In this book, we consciously chose an approach that emphasizes culture and communication. The reader should not forget, however, that certain structural processes operating in contemporary societies related to the social, economic, and political dimensions of these societies have also con- tributed to the present crisis relating to truth and reality. These structural processes affect people’s use of reason, that is, their capacity to judge real- ity, causing them to judge it by more emotional and idiosyncratic means (following the definition of post-truth set forth above). Before describing below the path of our cultural and communicative focus in Chaps. 2, 3, 4, and 5, we briefly describe three of these structural processes: individualiza- tion, bureaucratization, and globalization. Individualization is the process by which people lose, or free themselves from, the web of social relationships that once supported them and bound them together. From a macro-social standpoint, individualization has cre- ated a progressively more atomistic society. This process has gained momentum over the last two centuries, and its present-day fruit can be seen in the fact that it has transformed everyone’s personal, and even inti- mate, life. In his book Risk Society, the sociologist Ulrich Beck observes that “the basic figure of fully developed modernity is the single person” (Beck 1992, p. 122). Accordingly, society is now “the fully mobile society of singles” (ibid.). Beck argues that this society of singles is the direction towards which we are all moving and that this course is irreversible. He believes that this society is the structural outcome of modernity and the attendant developments in the job market: The form of existence of the single person is not a deviant case along the path of modernity. It is the archetype of the fully developed labor market society. The negation of social ties that takes effect in the logic of the market begins in its most advanced stage to dissolve the prerequisites for lasting companionship. (ibid., p. 123) Pressed by the market, the requirements of family, marriage, parent- hood, and partnership are ignored. Just as the traditional form of the 6 G. MADDALENA AND G. GILI heterosexual family, based on role distinctions between men and women and aimed at the socialization of children—the family Talcott Parsons referred to in the 1950s (Parsons and Bales 1955)—corresponded to the needs of the industrial and urban society of the mid-twentieth century, the society of singles corresponds to the changed needs of our present-day job market. Nowadays “the labor market demands mobility without regard to personal circumstances” (Beck 1992, p. 116). Especially with the preva- lence of telematics and mobile media devices, the current market requires that workers be constantly available, and therefore free from demanding social relationships like those of the traditional family. Beck notes that the final outcome of this process may be a welcome increase in the protection of individual human rights but fears that it will also involve a closing of “the circle of individualization” in which “the designs of independence become the prison bars of loneliness” (ibid., p. 123). The process of indi- vidualization has been accompanied by the new models of human rela- tionship favoured by the internet. Wellman, one of the most important scholars writing about the sociology of social media and the web, has called the basic principle of this new communicative situation “individual- ized networking” or “networked individualism” (Wellman 2001, 2002; Rainie and Wellman 2012). While it is true that the main reference point of our time is the indi- vidual, this individual is not the Promethean self of the Renaissance nor the self-made man of early capitalism, the kind of idealized characters who were the first models of individualism in the modern epoch. The self of our society is a “minimal self,” focused only on himself/herself (Lasch 1984). The work of reasoning, making decisions, and planning and exe- cuting social change is now performed by enormous organizations and administrative bodies, with individuals becoming less and less central and influential. This can be identified as the process of bureaucratization. Some of the most important scholars of mass society during the 1950s and the 1960s, like Karl Mannheim, Charles Wright Mills, and Robert Nisbet, observed that changes in the structure of the society towards larger dimen- sions and greater complexity have inevitably issued in more and more bureaucratization, whose formal and inhuman rationality has progressively come to prevail in modern society. The ability of mere individuals to understand the social world has decreased because they do not have the tools to comprehend what is happening around them or the meaning of events and their consequences, let alone the possibility of directing or influencing those events. Facing a technological system that exceeds his/ her possibilities of comprehension and action, the human being shows  1 WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT? 7 what he/she is: a small being, weak and poor if singularly taken, since many entities can do more and better than he/she does (Donati 2009, p. 117). This transfer of rationality and power from individuals to organi- zations is strongly fuelled by digital systems and platforms, and it is not by chance that people now think of these systems and platforms, operated by the “custodians of the internet” (Gillespie 2018), as the most powerful entities operating in present-day societies. The big enterprises and admin- istrative bodies, namely the big bureaucracies, have made use of a power- ful tool of formal rationality—algorithms—whose inhuman, hidden rationality can decide the fate of enterprises, people, and financial arrange- ments without having to explain or be accountable to anyone. The third important structural process operating in contemporary soci- eties is globalization. From an economic standpoint, globalization means the intertwining of world economies and international markets, resulting in the rapid movement of products, capital, and jobs. Enterprises take on worldwide scope without regard for regional and national borders. From a legal and political point of view, the most significant aspect of globaliza- tion is the peripheralization of the nation-state, that is, the simultaneous rapid growth of supranational institutions and the waning power and con- trol of the nation-state over economic and financial affairs. Another effect of globalization is the growth in the geographical extension, interconnec- tion, and speed of information and communications technologies. Manuel Castells identifies globalization as “the rise of the network society,” char- acterized by the binomial of connected versus not connected (Castells 1996). This new binomial redefines the meaning of the concepts of iden- tity, belonging, inclusion, sovereignty, and citizenship. The increasing interdependence among global systems implies a dark side involving previ- ously unimagined threats: environmental disasters with a global impact like the Chernobyl accident and the British Petroleum oil spill off the US coast in 2010; the rapid, global spread of diseases like SARS, avian influ- enza, mad cow disease, and COVID-19; and the growth of illegal net- works engaged in drug dealing, money laundering, the weapons trade, and international terrorism. Osterhammel and Petersson have observed that globalization is not an autonomously operating process or an unstoppable historical phenomenon because macroscopic events are always the result of individual and collective activity—the work of globalization involves many different actors with diverse visions and strategies (Osterhammel and Petersson 2009, p. 151). Sometimes, these actions have unintended global side effects. “We must remember that much of what appears in retrospect to have been the logical consequence of a world growing smaller was also 8 G. MADDALENA AND G. GILI due to unintended side effects of behavior that definitely has no global aims” (ibid., p. 152). However much that may be the case, globalization is felt by individuals to be a fated and often hostile process led by powers beyond their control, including the impersonal laws of the market, Wall Street tycoons, bureaucrats in Brussels and Washington D.C., Hollywood corporations, and the masters of the internet. The fact that globalization sweeps away identities, local economic systems, traditions, lifestyles, and social relationships has caused widespread bewilderment. The structural processes we have summarized influence individuals’ ways of thinking, feeling, and acting towards their increased reliance on emotion and personal belief, a tendency that is part of the definition of the concept of post-truth. However, our discussion in this book will chiefly focus on reconstructing the historical and theoretical roots of the com- municative and cultural processes that were the basis of the intellectual parable told in the second half of the nineteenth century, a parable that resulted in some unexpected, problematic consequences and led more or less directly to the present-day phenomenon of post-truth. The discussion in our book will unfold in four stages: The second chapter (‘Post-Truth in Practice’) focuses on the develop- ment of the manipulative practices that have defined the contemporary era from World War I to the present. We will attempt, albeit in a necessarily simplified manner, to provide an original contribution to a critical recon- struction of the picture of what happened and is currently happening in the world of communication. In the third chapter (‘Post-Truth in Theory’), we’ll analyse two notable cultural processes that characterized the twentieth century: first, the marked development of the analysis and understanding of human motives, behaviour, social dynamics, and collective phenomena achieved by the psychosocial sciences; and second, the profound critical redefinition of the concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ that took place in the fields of philosophy, psychology, sociology, communication, and journalism. This chapter is intended to offer a multidisciplinary picture of the soil in which the tree of post-truth took root, which in our view has not yet been provided by the numerous essays and commentaries analysing the OED’s decision to high- light the term. The fourth chapter (‘The Backlash and Side Effects’) will illuminate the consequences generated, voluntarily or involuntarily, by the transforma- tion of the conceptions of truth and reality, which run contrary to the expectations, often so full of hope and good intentions, that accompanied  1 WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT? 9 this transformation. The sudden arrival in the media and political worlds of new figures who unexpectedly exploited the persuasive power of new media; the unprecedented disruption of communicative hierarchies by the way the internet allows for anyone to become a broadcaster, producer, opinion leader, or influencer; and the risks attendant to the increase in self-­referential phenomena on the web, in which communication takes place primarily in homogenous spaces and does not encourage openness to diversity of opinion, are among the most significant of these consequences. The final chapter ‘The Future of Post-Truth: Defences, Defended, and Defenceless’ asks who is best equipped to defend himself/herself from the negative effects of post-truth and fake news. We will analyse some of the strategies and proposals that have been advanced to resist the growing threat that post-truth poses to global communications and propose an original, critical solution. Note 1. The term ‘post-truth’ was first used by scholars and journalists in the 1990s (Tesich 1992; Keyes 2004), but it would be years before it would become an established term in either the journalistic or popular lexicon. The expression ‘fake news’ can be traced back in print to the end of the nineteenth century and perhaps earlier (cf. Merriam-Webster, The Real Story of ‘Fake News,’ https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-real-story-of- fake-news). References Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology. London: Jason Aronson Inc. Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage. Bramson, L. (1961). The Political Context of Sociology. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Castells, M. (1996). The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Darnton, R. (2017). The True History of Fake News. New York Review of Books. Retrieved from http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/02/13/the-true- history-of-fake-news/. Donati, P. (2009). La società dell’umano. Genova-Milano: Marietti. Gili, G. (2001). Il problema della manipolazione: peccato originale dei media? Milano: FrancoAngeli. 10 G. MADDALENA AND G. GILI Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Giner, S. (1976). Mass Society. London: Martin Robertson. Keyes, R. (2004). The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Lasch, C. (1984). The Minimal Self. Psychic Survival in Troubled Times. New York: Norton. Lefebvre, G. (1932). La grande peur de 1789. Paris: Armand Colin. Mannheim, K. (1940). Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Margalit, A. (2017). On Betrayal. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Osterhammel, J., & Petersson, N. P. (2009). Globalization: A Short History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Parsons, T., & Bales, R. F. (1955). Family, Socialization and Interaction Process. New York: The Free Press. Rainie, L., & Wellman, B. (2012). Networked: The New Social Operating System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Riva, G. (2018). Fake News. Vivere e sopravvivere in un mondo post-verità. Bologna: Il Mulino. Tesich, S. (1992, January 6–13). A Government of Lies. The Nation. Wellman, B. (2001). Physical Place and Cyber Place: The Rise of Personalized Networking. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25(2), 227–252. Wellman, B. (2002). Little Boxes, Glocalization, and Networked Individualism. In M. Tanabe, P. Van den Besselaar, & T. Ishida (Eds.), Digital Cities II: Computational and Sociological Approaches (pp. 10–25). New York: Springer.  CHAPTER 2 Post-Truth in Practice Abstract Here we define and describe certain manipulative practices that have become increasingly prevalent over the course of the last century. We describe the universe of fake news as consisting of three concentric circles. Factoids, or news about events that have not happened, form the innermost circle. The second circle is comprised of opportunism, frame manipulation, words about words (polls, talk shows, and the politics of announcement), pseudo-events, quantitative deformation and qualitative alteration of reality, and omissions and choices related to contextualization, continuity, separa- tion, and the hierarchy of news. Jokes and white lies make up the third cir- cle. All of the practices discussed in the chapter are highlighted through the use of examples taken from the history of media and communication. Keywords Mainstream media Social media Factoids Opportunistic strategies Frame manipulation Pseudo-events Fake news “Whatever we know about our society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media. This is true not only of our knowledge of society and history but also of our knowledge of nature” (Luhmann 2000, p. 1). This affirmation by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann describes our own experience. What are the essential character- istics of these mediators of our knowledge of the world? Luhmann © The Author(s) 2020 11 G. Maddalena, G. Gili, The History and Theory of Post-Truth Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41460-3_2 12 G. MADDALENA AND G. GILI identifies two: the first is that because they do not engage in face-to-face communication, “the interruption of direct contact ensures high levels of freedom of communication” (ibid., p. 2). When people interact face to face, their connection is more intense and demanding, since their actions take place in sight of and under the effective control of one or more oth- ers. In contrast to face-to-face interaction, the interruption of immediate contact made possible by long-distance communication technology ensures a greater degree of freedom for recipients. These latters can in general freely decide the level of attention they will pay to a broadcaster, whether to be engaged or not, and if they are, how to best respond. In communication via mass media “two selecting factors are at work: the extent of willingness to transmit and the amount of interest in tuning in, which cannot be coordinated centrally. The organizations which produce mass media communication are dependent upon assumptions concerning acceptability” (ibid., pp. 2–3). Even in the most monolithic, authoritarian, and controlled systems of mass communication, the recipient’s interest in being connected remains the insuperable condition of the communicative relationship. The broadcaster can attempt to attract and maintain the recipient’s attention by various means, but has no way to compel that attention. At the same time—and this is Luhmann’s second fundamental charac- teristic of mass media—the mediators cannot free themselves from the “suspicion of motives” surrounding their transmissions (ibid., p. 44). Those who speak through or with mass media do not do it for the simple pleasure of communicating something, but instead are always motivated by some ulterior goal or interest: “It may be that everything they write or broadcast is relevant, but that does not answer the question: what for? Their concern may be to achieve commercial success, or to promote ideo- logical options, to support political tendencies, to maintain the social sta- tus quo (this in particular by providing a drug-like distraction towards ever new items of news) or simply to be a commercial success” (ibid., p. 39). This chapter will attempt to point out some of the principal manipula- tive practices that validate people’s “suspicion of motives” with respect to the media.  2 POST-TRUTH IN PRACTICE 13 2.1   Who’s Speaking (But Really)? In daily life, one may encounter people in disguise, those who with their words or actions purport to be someone other than who they actually are (Goffman 1990, ch. 4). This occurs less frequently when people are linked by familiar relationships that are close, strong and based on long-shared experience and habit. False representations happen quite frequently in today’s world, as our society has seen a marked increase in interactions with anonymous and unknown interlocutors; this change affects both the credibility of the speaker and the trust of the recipient.1 Although the risk of being subjected to false representations is always present in daily inter- actions, it has assumed an entirely new form in interactions that take place digitally, in which one can present made-up identities supported by aliases, and in which the communicating parties can send photographs or even inauthentic images that, while on the one hand potentially guarantee interactions that are ludic and free from obligation, also expose those interactions to a high risk of deceit and infection by perverse role-­ playing games. In general, we can term this attitude ‘opportunism,’ meaning a com- municative strategy in which particular signs and gestures are used not to reveal who one is, but instead to appear to be someone he or she is not (Bacharach and Gambetta 2001). Opportunistic strategies used by normal individuals, as opposed to those used by skilled professional scammers, are always slightly improvised and unsophisticated, but large organizations and the mainstream media may possess significant skills in this area. Contrary to the popular belief that commercial advertising is the most manipulative offering of mass media, its messages are in reality fairly clear about their source: the company that commissioned the advertisement, which must be explicitly named (Luhmann 2000, pp. 44–45). The pur- pose of the advertisement is clear: to sell the recipient the featured product or service. Can we state with any certainty that the same is true of other messages and news items that crowd the communicative environment? When, for example, we read an article in a newspaper, see a post on a web- site or a social network, or listen to a television or radio report, are we always clear about the ‘true’ author or source of the message and the pur- pose for which it was created? Likewise, are we sure that the many enter- tainment programmes, platforms, and portals with which we interact are not hiding political, ideological, or commercial subtexts? There are a number of opportunistic strategies worth considering. 14 G. MADDALENA AND G. GILI One common strategy is to create an idealized and falsified self-image that does not correspond to one’s real identity. This situation can be defined as the contradiction between identity and image. Some examples that come to mind are people who practise medicine without the requisite education or other categories of swindlers who operate under false pre- tences. The digital version of this time-tested strategy is to alter one’s social media profiles in order to appear more attractive or convincing. This phenomenon is practised not only by individuals but also by large organi- zations, such as the banks whose falsified books played such a large role in the recent financial crisis after regulatory institutions failed to adequately perform their task as guarantors and intermediaries of public confidence.2 A second opportunistic strategy is “doublespeak” (Lutz 1989) or the use of language that evades, negates, or dodges the speaker’s responsibil- ity. One example is the use by government spokespeople of verbal formu- lations that obscure the subject with the passive voice, making it appear that certain events, usually negative ones, happen spontaneously, mechani- cally, or inevitably, without anyone having any discernible responsibility. Another is the use of euphemism or technical or aseptic jargon that dulls the effect of dramatic events having tragic consequences, like ‘low-­intensity conflicts,’ ‘collateral damage,’ and ‘surgical air strikes.’ A third form of opportunism is “ingratiation” (Jones and Wortman 1973), by which the speaker consciously assimilates himself with the audi- ence in order to mislead it. Certainly, communicative relationships always operate within a process of reciprocal attraction in which the speaker in some way adapts his or her message to the particular audience and the context (Byrne 1971). However, ingratiation is somehow different. Instantiation of ingratiation can be the seller’s strategy that shows that he/she has customer-like opinions and tastes to better penetrate his/her defences. Something similar happens in the behaviour of politicians, to whom the internet and the social media offer broader opportunities for this strategy. Social media in fact “is itself based around self-promotion: you are what you present (i.e. how you promote yourself), and it is that constant self-promotion that drives content creation, making other users entertained” (Kalpokas 2018, p. 15). In politics, “Barack Obama would, perhaps, be one of the pioneering examples, courtesy of his constant attempt to forge a ‘cool’ image through immersion in popular culture, permanent self-representation on social media, emphasis on friendship with high-profile celebrities, and a general feel-good can-do attitude.”  2 POST-TRUTH IN PRACTICE 15 (ibid.) On the contrary, “Trump, due to his engagement in self-­promotion that is so clear and blatant that is suddenly becomes open and transpar- ent … can be interpreted as being more authentic and acting with greater integrity than a sleek self-presenter, such as Obama” (ibid.). A fourth opportunistic strategy with particularly serious and dangerous implications occurs when a speaker is simply acting as a mouthpiece for other subjects who prefer to remain hidden. This is seen in daily life, for example, when rumours are spread by someone who profits from them but remains in the shadows. This is commonplace in the media world as well and in that context is referred to as “devil’s news” (Pratkanis and Aronson 1992, ch. 2; Fertilio 1994; Entman 2012), and involves the unscrupulous use of the media, primarily by third parties, for purposes that have nothing to do with information, including leaking confidential intelligence or classified information, disclosing planned governmental initiatives, or interviews released with the goal of conveying specific mes- sages to targeted recipients. The numerous high-profile disclosures of confidential information by WikiLeaks is one notable example of this opportunistic strategy; this case involved the disclosure of confidential information stolen from the secret archives of public and private bodies, both national and international. This is an example of the proliferation— made possible by the rapid development of the internet—of unauthorized activity. In fact, many of the controversies surrounding Donald Trump after his election revolved around accusations that members of his family and staff were in contact with WikiLeaks or other unknown actors during the campaign in order to access information extracted from Hillary Clinton’s emails to damage her reputation. However, this same weapon was used against Trump: his attitude towards women became one of the primary issues of the campaign after the Washington Post posted a video secretly recorded in 2005 that showed the GOP candidate expressing vul- gar and sexist comments in a private setting. This incident was followed by a systematic hunt of public interviews and television appearances by other media outlets for similar offensive material. The strategies mentioned thus far are by and large traditional strategies used to obscure the identity of the true authors or sources of the many messages we receive in a communicative environment that is ever more saturated by media. Today, however, the development of digital media and artificial intelligence has allowed for a true qualitative leap in opportunistic strategies via two new phenomena: ‘social bots’ and ‘deepfakes.’ 16 G. MADDALENA AND G. GILI Social bots are computer programs that imitate human behaviour in order to convince other users that they are actually human, which allows them to be used for deceptive purposes and data thefts.3 In numerous democratic countries, including the US, France, Germany, the UK, and Japan, unknown actors have penetrated networks by creating thousands of fake Facebook and Twitter profiles by means of these bots. ‘Deepfakes’ involve the use of artificial intelligence techniques to create realistic replicas of a human subject. This technology can be used, for example, to create an ‘assistant’ in the image of the user, able to replace the user in simple interactive tasks like reserving a table at a restaurant or booking a flight. They can, however, also be used for manipulative or criminal purposes. For example, it is possible to superimpose the faces of famous actresses onto the bodies of pornographic actresses in a manner that seems completely realistic (this has already been done to Gal Gadot and Scarlett Johansson). Deepfakes can also be used in politics; for exam- ple, videos can be created in which an artificial duplicate of a political fig- ure, obtained by electronic synthesis, gives a speech or performs an action that is supplemented, like Frankenstein’s monster, by built-up pieces of authentic verbal content and non-verbal images that render it entirely credible (Floridi 2018). While fake news deals in some way with the content of messages, deep- fakes create a simulacrum of the speaker, who can be made to say or do anything, from the ground up. The danger of this technology lies in the fact that it exploits our belief in the authenticity of what we see and hear with our own senses, and therefore see as real and worthy of trust. Fake photomontages and videos are certainly not new inventions, but deepfakes represent a qualitative leap, allowing for perfect verisimilitude thanks to their use of composite images that can perfectly reproduce the voice, face, and body of a person. They appear realistic and plausible and to be exam- ples of the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, but this appear- ance is outrageously false. 2.2   The Rigged Game of Framing Frame manipulation is closely tied to alteration of identity. Frames are systems of reference that our society and culture offer so that we can understand situations in which we are involved or which we observe; so that, for example, we are able to distinguish a wedding from a funeral or a university exam from a talk show, and can thereby engage in the behaviour  2 POST-TRUTH IN PRACTICE 17 expected in each situation (Goffman 1974). The possibility that people apply the same interpretative frames to the same event in order to under- stand what is happening and how they ought to behave contributes to the creation of orderly social interactions. Sometimes, however, ambiguous situations make it difficult to apply a single frame: for example, two people fighting may hate one another and wish to do each other harm, or they may simply be fighting as a game or a joke. People may also act deliberately to create frame confusion with the goal of misleading their interlocutors. As Goffman observes, this frame confu- sion arises from the intentional effort of one or more individuals to manage activity so that a party of one or more others will be induced to have a false belief about what it is that is going on. A nefarious design is involved, a plot of treacher- ous plan leading—when realized—to a falsification of some part of the world.…Those who engineer the deception can be called the operatives, fabricators, deceivers. Those intendedly taken in can be said to be con- tained—contained in a construction or fabrication. They can be called the dupes, marks, pigeons, suckers, butts, victims, gulls.…Observe that for those in on a deception, what is going on is fabrication; for those contained, what is going on is what is being fabricated. The rim of the frame is a con- struction, but only the fabricators so see it. (ibid., pp. 83–84) For example, consider the easiest case: a wholesaler who invites a client to dinner creates a friendly atmosphere with the help of numerous bottles of wine, and then later the same night proposes a large order to the client. In this case, the wholesaler plays the role of friend and relates to his companion as a friend, while in reality pursuing an instrumental end inspired by the vendor-client relationship that does not pertain to friendship. His true pur- pose is commercial (to sell) even if that purpose is concealed in the frame of a friend relationship. As has been documented, this phenomenon also accompanies the communication of many companies that have discovered the advantages of presenting themselves to their clients adorned with ethi- cal, sustainable, or philanthropic values; despite this adornment, the client still suspects that these values are a facade for a completely instrumental goal. This form of manipulation, in which the recipient of a communication is made to believe that the picture they see is the real one while it in fact contains and obscures a different picture, is widespread in news media. Strategic communications are presented as news, when they are in fact produced by the public relations offices of public figures, parties, organi- zations, companies, or lobbies with the goal of influencing their 18 G. MADDALENA AND G. GILI audiences, and therefore have primarily persuasive ends. The most fre- quent and prominent example is advertising disguised as information. One of the most famous cases in memory was the opening of the first McDonald’s in Moscow in 1990, seen by more than 20 million people on the news. “You may remember a particular story that showed long lines of Russians waiting, the Russian menu, the Russian servers. This story was created not by news reporters covering the Russian capital but by a public relations firm working in behalf of McDonald’s, Patterson-Parkington First International of Toronto” (Limburg 1994, p. 121). A persuasive communication, one which would be easily recognizable by the public as such and therefore instinctively marked as less trustworthy, disguises itself in this way in order to circumvent the selective barriers of mistrust and rejection that could defeat the message were it to be presented as it truly is. While advertising is the most common example of this, many other types of strategic and persuasive communication come disguised as ideologically and politically oriented messages and pervade lighter and more entertainment-focused contexts. We frequently see political leaders presenting their latest novel on TV or cooking some local specialty, ensur- ing a particularly sympathetic setting to reveal their ‘human side,’ presenta- tions which have assumed great importance in today’s spectacle and media-heavy politics. Still more common are social media posts intending to humanize public and political figures which, amongst scenes and moments from their daily and family lives deftly accompanied by their thoughts and emotions, clandestinely transmit their entire political platform. 2.3   Words That Obscure Facts Another noticeable trend in the current informational world is to refer not to events, but instead to opinions, statements, comments, speeches, and stories about events. News often includes references to other voices in direct quotes or indirect reported speeches, voices which are embedded in the flow of its storytelling (Goffman 1981, pp. 153–154). The principal media genres exhibiting these characteristics are interviews, televised debates, talk shows, and surveys. The paradox is that these genres are usu- ally presented as being the closest to the ideal of objectivity: they involve the very words of the interview subjects, the direct participation of debat- ers and talk show guests, and the ‘authentic’ opinions of citizens revealed  2 POST-TRUTH IN PRACTICE 19 by ‘scientifically reliable’ surveys. Here, the media acts as an amplifier and recycler of the messages of others: A considerable part of the material for press, radio and television comes about because the media are reflected in themselves and they treat this in turn as an event. People might be asked for their opinions, or they might impose them. But these are always events which would not take place at all if there were no mass media. The world is being filled, so to speak, with additional noise, with initiatives, commentaries, criticism. Prior to decisions being made, prominent members of society are asked what they are demand- ing or expecting; after the decisions have been made, they are asked what they think of them. This is one way to accentuate what is happening anyway. But commentary too can become an opportunity for criticism and criticism can offer an opportunity for commentary. In this way the mass media can increase their own sensitivity and adapt to changes in public opinion which they themselves produced. (Luhmann 2000, pp. 33–34) This process creates a communicative environment that is increasingly a ‘cacophony’ of mediated voices (Silverstone 2007, ch. 1) where refer- ence to the facts, actions, and events at the origin of words and speeches becomes ever more distant, dim and part of a remote and confusing back- ground. Robert Darnton put it this way: “The bulimia of opinions is kill- ing information” (Darnton 2018). Another contributing factor to this complex game of mirrors in which the media are both actors and directors is the increasing use by politicians of the ‘politics of announcement,’ in which an event—a decision, action, law, or policy—is publicized despite the fact that it is not yet in existence, and in many cases will never exist except as part of the speech in which it is presented. This kind of game relies on the expectation, created by the media, that any politician’s smallest utterance can reach a vast audience. Politicians are thus eager to say something new that can be mediatized. The result is “the primacy of the anticipation over the content, which adds another facet to the idea of the self-involvement of political actors in their mediatization” (Marcinkowski 2014, p. 17).4 In the same mould is the media’s strategy of using headlines and announcements of ‘breaking news,’ which may include ‘bombshell’ revelations about anything from Russian electoral interference to dire weather predictions, but which often refer to already-known facts or to unimportant events. A particular form of the politics of announcement is the use and abuse of political polls. Polls make a strong claim to being scientific and univer- sal, and the reliability of their methods is touted by polling organizations. 20 G. MADDALENA AND G. GILI The growing influence of polls is the result of the lower stability of politi- cal affiliation today as compared to the past, the growing influence of the culture of marketing within the political world, and the possibility that they can be used not only as a source of information but also as instru- ments to influence public opinion. Polls play an ever-larger role in the political life of democratic countries but their use sometimes comes with perverse side effects. First, and con- nected to the strategy of announcement, polls are an instrument of pres- sure on public opinion. They not only provide a more or less accurate map of the climate of public opinion but they are also a way to influence and modify that same climate. In the past, people organized marches in order to support or challenge a political position, a leader, a party, or a govern- ment (Meyrowitz 1985, ch. 15; Green 2010). Now, the same effect can also be caused by disseminating poll results when they are in line with a direction one wants to suggest. The reason is that the opinion of the majority, or what is presented as the opinion of the majority by polls and media, creates a ‘drag effect’ on individuals, in particular on those more undecided, more isolated, and less informed (Noelle-Neumann 1984; Price 1992). Second, polls create a gap between the timeline of political discussion, deliberation and action, and the timeline of public opinion. Even if public opinion surveyed by polls is presented as the source of legitimacy of gov- ernments and democratic institutions, it has different timing and rhythms than those institutions. Public opinion is unstable, changing, ephemeral, while governments and institutions require long-term stability. The politi- cal use of polls can subvert the meaning of politics, giving voice to a sense of immediacy that is out of step with the fact that the workings of politics need time and mediation (Innerarity 2006; Costa and Gili 2014). This sometimes has the profound effect of changing the very nature of political action, which becomes obligated to follow the mutable course of public opinion as represented by polling, influenced as it is by the mood of the moment, as well as susceptible to manipulation by the polls themselves or by the way they are applied. Notwithstanding the increased reliability of polling, there have been glaring errors. Sometimes polls have failed to predict the real voting inten- tions of citizens, who, by their confidence in or mistrust of this abused instrument have greatly limited its power. It is necessary only to recall the examples of the results of the 2015 Israeli elections, the 2016 American elections that brought Trump to the White House, and the Brexit  2 POST-TRUTH IN PRACTICE 21 referendum. As the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once declared: “I’ve always lost elections in the polls and won them on elec- tion day.” 2.4   The Creation of Pseudo-Events Another process that is representative of the blurring of social reality and the reality of the media, between truth and truth-likeness, is the creation of what Daniel Boorstin at the beginning of the 1960s termed ‘pseudo-­ events’ (Boorstin 1961). These are non-spontaneous events, expressly cre- ated and organized for the purpose of being reported on or re-broadcast by mass media. Those who create pseudo-events must, in order to best exploit media publicity, stage them according to particular criteria of newsworthiness: novelty, drama, twists, and unexpected events, with the involvement of important figures. Edward Bernays, the first theorist and strategist of public relations, did precisely this many times with great mastery. During Calvin Coolidge’s 1924 presidential campaign, Bernays organized a breakfast between the man who would come to be called ‘Silent Cal’ and a large group of Broadway actors in order to humanize Coolidge and make him more pop- ular, creating from the event a short film to be used as propaganda for his ultimately successful campaign. Some years later, Bernays organized a group of young women to smoke cigarettes in the 1929 Easter Sunday parade on New York’s Fifth Avenue; they paused ostentatiously in front of churches and restaurants, with the apparent purpose of affirming their defiance of social customs and their desire for emancipation. In reality, the leader of the group of smokers was none other than Bernays’s own secre- tary, and the event—rather, pseudo-event—was financed by the American Tobacco Company, a leading manufacturer of cigarettes, with the goal of increasing female consumption of its product. Although nearly a century old, this is a textbook example: the commercial purpose—strengthening the sales of a product—was pursued by leveraging a potentially scandalous subject involving social customs and gender politics; the event was planned in order to attract the attention of those present and of the press; and finally, to guarantee optimum visibility, it was publicized beforehand to the media, complete with high-quality photographs in case those taken by newspaper photographers failed to capture sufficiently evocative images. Almost one hundred years later, the creation of pseudo-events is a strat- egy practised by every office and agency of communication in our 22 G. MADDALENA AND G. GILI media-­saturated society, even though not all practitioners display the nec- essary ability to ‘break through’ the screen, that is, to land on the front page of newspapers or go viral online. The theatrical skills of the events’ creators and participating public figures go a long way, but the more or less favourable and complicit attitude of the media and large tech compa- nies is always decisive, whether that attitude is based on an ideological affinity with the event or on a simple professional desire to report interest- ing news. On the international stage, examples from the last decade include the protests by Femen activists, who disrupt official gatherings and confront politicians while naked, or the performance by three members of the Russian feminist punk-rock band Pussy Riot, who protested Putin’s re-­ election in 2012 by playing a sacrilegious song/prayer hostile to Putin and the Orthodox patriarch Kirill in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, near the Kremlin. In addition to these uses of pseudo-events by more or less marginal subjects wishing to divert media attention away from more important fig- ures, it is worth observing—and this is where our primary interest lies— that the holders of political power also create these events systematically, every day. The strategy is to create cumulative pseudo-events, from which the effect comes not because they are remarkable but because of their ceaseless repetition and the manner in which they capture media attention on a daily basis. From this point of view, institutions of political and gov- ernmental power are serial creators of pseudo-events. In authoritarian regimes, mass media have always been compelled to recount the achieve- ments of their leaders, who must appear tireless, omnipresent, capable of great feats and gestures of humanity, and to be excellent athletes; this lat- ter characteristic has spawned a tradition ranging from Mao Zedong’s famous 1966 swim in the Yangtze River to coverage of Putin’s heroic personal intervention to save a TV crew put in danger by an encounter with a ferocious Siberian tiger. However, even in Western countries with established democratic gov- ernments and a free press, political and governmental institutions appear to be committed to producing pseudo-events through press offices and image consultants. Ronald Reagan was the first US president to use this strategy of continual and systematic media visibility, whether it be break- ing ground for a school, speaking to a gathering of veterans, throwing out the first pitch at a baseball game, or giving an unexpected announcement in an informal context. Since Reagan, the officials who manage White  2 POST-TRUTH IN PRACTICE 23 House communications, from the Bushes and Clinton to Obama and Trump (who, like his predecessor, ably uses mass and social media) have deliberately exploited this technique, continually creating stories, putting on events, triggering controversies, putting out statements, and produc- ing images that the media promptly turn into news, worried about not breaking the story. 2.5   Factoids: Media Hallucinations That Modify Reality Another fundamental form of media manipulation is the creation of news about an event that has not happened, so-called factoids. Factoids repre- sent to social and communicative phenomena what hallucinations repre- sent to the disorders of an individual psyche: they are in some ways collective hallucinations (Pratkanis and Aronson 1992; Gili 2001). They differ from pseudo-events in that they are not events artificially created for the press which are nonetheless real, but are rather ‘non-events,’ apparent realities that never took place, which the mass media presents as real and become real as a result of their consequences and effects. These include pure fabrications, rumours, urban legends, and gossip that are treated as real news and can therefore affect the public. For a factoid to appear cred- ible and therefore be successful, verisimilitude is essential: it must include characters, clues, and proofs; even if by themselves these pieces of evidence are random and meaningless, together they create a completely plausible picture. Conversations about factoids sometimes refer to the touching story that appeared in the Washington Post nearly forty years ago titled “Jimmy’s World,” which was an altogether-invented story of the life of Jimmy, an African-American boy born and raised in a poor neighbourhood and, like his mother and grandmother, already addicted to heroin at the age of eight. The story earned its young and ambitious author, Janet Cooke, the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 1981, but the prize was withdrawn when the story was exposed as a fake. The factoid created by Janet Cooke following the suggestions of the ‘new journalism’ is a relatively minor episode compared to other notorious examples. In the 1930s the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda was shaping a factoid of a much greater and more tragic magnitude: the theory of a Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination. This factoid’s origin was 24 G. MADDALENA AND G. GILI one of the greatest historical falsifications of all time, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This document, probably composed by agents of the Tsarist secret police, appeared in the early twentieth century and was passed off as an authentic account of secret meetings held in Basel on the occasion of the 1897 World Zionist Conference, during which a plan was purportedly drafted to achieve world domination through financial con- trol and terrorism. Despite their fictive nature, the Protocols were repeat- edly republished and disseminated during the years following World War I, feeding the anti-Semitic propaganda that reached its tragic climax with Nazi racial laws and the Holocaust. As for the document’s plausibility, many people concluded that because the founder of Communism, many industrialists, and numerous prominent figures in finance were Jewish, there was sufficient proof of the ‘Jewish menace’ to the integrity of the ‘Aryan people.’ Armed conflict and violent political upheaval create an ideal environ- ment for the creation of factoids, as was the case with the Protocols. Another emblematic example was the fake ‘massacre of Timisoara’ during the fateful year of 1989, which led to the collapse of the Communist gov- ernments of Eastern Europe. During the course of protests and clashes in Romania between the public and Ceausescu’s police, Western news agen- cies picked up a report of uncertain origin but supported by cleverly forged TV images of horribly mutilated corpses that claimed a death toll of over 4600, which would have made it the bloodiest event in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. There was in reality no such massa- cre, but the fake news evidently turned out to be quite useful in magnify- ing the notoriety of the bloody Ceausescu regime and hastening its downfall. The news was immediately picked up by major international media outlets, and by the time the falsification was discovered, it had already worked its intended effect on international public opinion (Ramonet 1990; Fracassi 1996). Among the most important factoids created by governments and the mainstream media that had an international impact were those invented to justify military intervention in the Gulf War and Iraq War (Entman 2004; Bennett et al. 2007). In the 1990 Gulf War, American media reported atrocities committed by the Iraqi army on Kuwaiti civilians; that news was specially concocted by a public relations agency financed by the Kuwaiti government-in-exile in order to influence Western public opinion. And, as is well known, prior to the Iraq War in 2003, the American administration of George W. Bush, the British government, and many Western media  2 POST-TRUTH IN PRACTICE 25 outlets endorsed the factoid that Saddam Hussein had accumulated stores of chemical weapons, which were never found. The same can be said of Western media reports that 30,000 had died in clashes in Libya in 2011 and 2012 at the beginning of the revolution that would lead to Qaddafi’s fall. In all these cases, the construction of factoids was key to the strategy of “creating an enemy” (Edelman 1964, 1977, 1988) and accelerated the fall of vicious dictators who had become inconvenient, creating a current of public opinion favourable to direct or indirect intervention. The digital version of a factoid is a so-called meme, which operates on very different levels (McLean 2017, ch. 4), but is nonetheless important and potentially dangerous. Memes often come in the form of images or short videos with captions that are used to report events that did not hap- pen.5 Memes, often aided by the flood of comments they generate, create true collective hallucinations; for example, the hysteria around the famous Pizzagate meme that inspired a man to fire a weapon into a Washington, D.C., pizzeria based on comments that tied it to a group of paedophiles directed by the Clinton family. As has been noted, factoids and fake news are not a recent discovery or exclusive product of recent years: the annals of history are full of journal- istic falsehoods constructed more or less deftly. Since World War I, they have been used to paint a hateful or caricatured image of one’s enemies and political adversaries in order to bring about their defeat. Sometimes factoids are the products of totalitarian or authoritarian regimes in partnership with unfree press or media; sometimes they are produced by democratic regimes in partnership with free press or media. Notwithstanding the differences between the regimes, the goals and the consequences are similar. They spread lies consciously and hide truths. A question arises: is the autocratic or democratic nature of regimes that cre- ate factoids sufficient to privilege one lie above the other? And is this privi- leging sufficient to condemn the lies in one case while justifying it in the other? 2.6   Lies, Omissions, and Much More So far we have focused on several types of information manipulation that are particularly relevant in today’s society, especially in light of the impact of the digital revolution. However, the spectrum of fake news is much broader. Mass media and social media offer innumerable examples and 26 G. MADDALENA AND G. GILI applications of the particular type of lie that Efron (1971) and Hofstetter (1976) called “distortion” and “bias.” There are many types of distor- tions, so it is difficult to provide an exhaustive typology. A primary fundamental distinction can be drawn between lies that relate to the quantitative dimensions of an event (‘deformation’) and those that refer to an event’s nature and qualitative characteristics (‘alteration’) (Jankélévitch 1998). A quintessential case of quantitative deformation relates to wartime body counts. As Walter Lippmann discovered when studying the number of dead in World War I, counts from the front always tend to inflate the enemy’s losses and minimize those from the side doing the counting. This is what Churchill did when shortly after the beginning of World War II he publicly announced that the British navy had sunk half of Germany’s U-boats (Roberts 2018). When the director of the anti-­ submarine war division contradicted him, showing that in fact only nine of fifty-seven U-boats had been sunk, Churchill replied: “There are two peo- ple who sink U-boats in this war, Talbot. You sink them in the Atlantic and I sink them in the House of Commons. The trouble is that you are sinking them at exactly half the rate I am.” Another case of quantitative falsification involves the number of victims of natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and famines. One might believe that there is no motive to twist the dimensions of this type of event, but this is not the case. Governments, especially in some countries, tend to underestimate the number of victims from these events, not only due to the lack of conclusive data, but also for reasons of internal politics and international prestige: they do not want to have to ask for aid and thereby reveal their internal inability to manage the crisis. On the other hand, some governments may augment the number of victims for the purpose of accessing more international support. While manipulation of death tolls is common, so is ‘correcting’ the number of the living. A typical case involves political or labour demonstra- tions, or civil unrest, which is often accompanied by a war of numbers between the participating organizations, who always tend to overestimate, and the opposition, who instead underestimate. Just to recall famous examples, think of how the communist government and media of Poland attempted unsuccessfully to downplay the numbers and impact of the first triumphant journey of John Paul II to Poland, or how Shapour Bakhtiar’s weak Iranian government after the Shah’s escape used the same strategy upon the Ayatollah Khomeini’s return from exile (Dayan and Katz 1992). The protests following Donald Trump’s election and the famous  2 POST-TRUTH IN PRACTICE 27 controversy about the attendance at his inaugural ceremony were also characterized by clashing numbers. Qualitative alteration, instead, consists of making things appear to be ‘different’ than they are, suggesting particular interpretations of social events and phenomena. This form of manipulation works through the power of language—verbal, written, or image-based—to hide or reveal simply by employing some expressions or images instead of others. Cases of image manipulation are particularly interesting, precisely because peo- ple trust most that which they can ‘see with their own eyes.’ One example is a famous historical photograph that became an icon of resistance to Nazism. Following a heavy German bombardment of London, the Daily Mail published an image of the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, intact and illuminated, but encircled by the flames of razed houses and dense clouds of smoke. The photo became an emblem of World War II: the miracu- lously intact dome appeared as a symbol of Good resisting Evil, the testi- mony of the free world’s will to oppose Nazism. But this image was revealed to be retouched. In order to make the image as powerful as pos- sible, the newspaper’s printers added black and grey brushstrokes to ren- der the scene darker and more dramatic. Curiously, even German newspapers printed the image, which was used by Nazi propagandists to demonstrate, with the opposite intent, that England was exhausted and close to surrender. Examples of falsification via photomontage for political purposes date back to the end of the nineteenth century: counter-­ revolutionary propagandists spread fairly crude photomontages showing priests being hunted and killed by revolutionaries of the Paris Commune. And thanks to Photoshop, these same means are now at the disposal of any user, who can with their smartphone retouch photos in many ways. News about the health of important political leaders has always given rise to sophisticated and theatrical information alteration campaigns, with the purpose of preventing the truth from creating a power vacuum or trig- gering mistrust, confusion, or the rise of hostile movements. The need to provide reassuring political messages impelled presidents Reagan and Yeltsin to stage events that showed them ‘in the saddle’ and ‘at the helm of the nation’ after periods of serious illness. Just hours after an operation to remove a tumour, Reagan was repeatedly photographed kissing his wife with a smile on his face. (Years later, his staff recounted how painful pre- paring the scene had been, with Reagan’s intubation, vomiting, and IVs.) In the midst of the Russian presidential campaign in June 1996, Boris Yeltsin took the even riskier measure of repeatedly appearing on television 28 G. MADDALENA AND G. GILI in the aftermath of his third serious heart attack, unable to completely hide his bloated and strained appearance. This measure involved the par- ticipation of associates and even foreign guests, who allowed themselves to be photographed in the Barvikha Sanatorium making (feigned) friendly conversation with the president (Fracassi 1996, p. 131). Omission, too, must be included among the types of falsification of information. This type of lie consists of the deliberate exclusion or down- playing of information crucial for understanding a fact, phenomenon, or problem. Omission works preventatively to decide what of a news item’s content ‘not’ to show, so that the citizen is unable to know what has been left out, even if he were to undertake an analysis at length of the article (or programme or post) in front of him (Cirino 1972). Even the choices made to contextualize news can be used to guide its interpretation in one particular direction or another. In fact, specific semantic relationships can be created by the placement of different news items on one newspaper sheet, by the sequencing of a television news pro- gramme, or by the sequencing and timing of posts. The arrangement of news can take place according to analogy or contrast, and it can also follow a sequence of increasing intensity or a chosen framework of examples and generalizations. Thus, dysfunction and scandals within a political or administrative system can be reported by presenting them as isolated and focusing on minute details or human interest titbits, or their links to other events, causes, and figures can be asserted; these differing approaches can tell the same story with an entirely different meaning. Links can be shrewdly insinuated: for example, positioning different criminal cases fea- turing immigrants on the same page or back-to-back in a news programme offers an interpretation of events without that interpretation being expressly indicated. Or one can cast doubt upon a wide range of political news by headlining on a news site or opening a newscast with a report on judicial investigations into political corruption. Choices made about con- tinuity, separation, and hierarchy always add connotations: they attribute commonalities or contrapositions, emphasize or mitigate, ennoble or disgrace. A great many strategies and techniques exist to manipulate information that, even without producing an outright lie, deform reality or, perhaps, the recipient’s viewpoint, pointing his interpretation in a particular direction.  2 POST-TRUTH IN PRACTICE 29 2.7   A Typology of Fake News The techniques and examples presented to this point demonstrate that there are many types of lies that can be classified as fake news. Therefore, while the use of this expression has increased significantly in the recent past in journalistic debates and common language, questions about its true usefulness have grown commensurately. It is in fact a vague term that encompasses a too-wide range of phenomena and manifestations.6 Thus, the British government in October 2018 decreed that official government documents and reports may no longer contain the expression fake news precisely because of its polysemy and vagueness, favouring more estab- lished and concrete terms like ‘disinformation.’ Nevertheless, since the expression continues to be widely used, we believe it is valuable to define more precisely its semantic reach. It is our view that the term encompasses three principal areas of meaning. (1) The term’s innermost ring of meaning relates to factoids or news about events that have not happened. As evident from the examples cited above, it is not by chance that, from World War I to the present, war and violent political upheaval have given an ideal context for this form of lie to flourish: the confusion generated by these circumstances allows for boast- ing about victories never achieved and for attributing atrocities and abuses to enemies or political adversaries in order to damage their public stand- ing, often by employing expertly forged photographic or audiovisual ‘evi- dence.’ Factoids, as with any other form of explicit lie are, however, ‘falsifiable’ in the Popperian sense of the term, and can be sustained only if the disseminators of these lies know that they are able to lie with impu- nity and without fear of being refuted because of their ability and power to control and suppress contrary information. In a pluralistic informa- tional context, some striking and significant cases notwithstanding, this becomes much more difficult since other news sources will report differ- ing and contradictory news that can reveal the lie. (2) Despite its importance for our analysis, the blatant lie comprises but a limited fraction of manipulative practices—lying explicitly and shame- lessly is not the only way to deceive and create false impressions. As Goffman observes: An ‘open,’ ‘flat,’ or barefaced lie may be defined as one for which there can be unquestionable evidence that the teller knew he lied and willfully did so. A claim to have been at a particular place at a particular time, when this was not the case, is an example.…Those caught out in the act of telling bare- 30 G. MADDALENA AND G. GILI faced lies not only lose face during the interaction but may have their face destroyed, for it is felt by many audiences that if an individual can bring himself to tell such a lie, he ought never again to be fully trusted.…Further, in everyday life it is usually possible for the performer to create intentionally almost any kind of false impression without putting himself in the indefen- sible position of having told a clear-cut lie. Communication techniques such as innuendo, strategic ambiguity, and crucial omissions allow the misin- former to profit from lies without, technically, telling any. The mass media have their own version of this and demonstrate that by judicious camera angles and editing, a trickle of response to a celebrity can be transformed into a wild stream. (Goffman 1990, p. 69) Thus, surrounding the innermost ring of the meaning of fake news, wholly invented events and stories (factoids), the term also includes a sec- ond and much larger area of manipulative strategies examined above: con- cealing the true author or source of a communication; frame manipulation; the magnification and repetition of opinions, which ends up suffocating and obscuring the facts and events giving birth to those opinions in favour of a sophisticated muddle of narrative and commentary; the construction of pseudo-events in order to attract and monopolize media and public attention; quantitative deformation and qualitative alteration of reality; and omissions and choices related to contextualization, continuity, separation, and hierarchy. While factoids represent exceptional and striking examples of fake news, the multiplicity of manipulative practices comprising this sec- ond vast grouping appears no less dangerous. They systematically contami- nate the communicative environment and form part of the arsenal of strategies willingly used by political powers, economic organizations, main- stream media, and now even social media users, singly or jointly. (3) Finally, there exists an ill-defined third area that contains a great many types of falsification considered more trivial or innocent that defy analytic classification and that perhaps would not be considered by many to be fake news. By way of example, it is worth mentioning here fake news created ‘as a joke’ or with ironic or satirical intent. Another form of manip- ulation that is often considered minor is white lies, or falsehoods con- ceived for the benefit of the person being deceived, such as false medical reassurances that hide a patient’s true condition from them or minimize public alarm surrounding an outbreak of an infectious disease. Then there are manipulations that wink at the recipient’s complicity, such as claques organized at public gatherings or television audiences who frenetically applaud the host.  2 POST-TRUTH IN PRACTICE 31 All of the above are without doubt examples, a few of many we could offer, of more insignificant forms of lies that can be more easily justified and absolved than outright deception. However, without lapsing into use- less moralism, we cannot ignore that these too pose a certain degree of ambivalence and risk. Where, for example, does the line between joke and mockery lie, or between irony and persecutory, dismissive derision? The example of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical journal whose headquarters were attacked by ISIS terrorists as revenge for blasphemous mockery, illustrates the knife’s edge we find ourselves on here. When mockery attacks a value that others find sacred and vital, where is the boundary between satire, lies, and violence? Who gets to decide for others the utility of or damage caused by a lie told ‘with good intent’? Does the complicity and involve- ment of a recipient who is ‘in on the game,’ even a game meant to deceive him, absolve the game’s designer? Finally, are not sloppiness and inaccu- racy in journalistic work also a source of pollution of the quality of infor- mation, pollution that significantly contributes to the degradation of the communicative environment and provides fertile ground for even more serious practices of manipulation? Notes 1. For in-depth analysis of credibility understood as a social relationship, see Gili (2005). 2. On the role of institutions that guarantee credibility and trust, see Coleman (1990, pp. 180–185). 3. On this new form of ‘automation of sociality,’ see Papsdorf (2015), Gehl and Bakardjieva (2017), and Wooley (2018). 4. For a general approach, see Esser and Strömbäck (2014). 5. The word ‘meme’ was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 in The Selfish Gene to explain the propagation of cultural information. 6. See, for example, Tandoc et al. (2017) and Jack (2017). References Bacharach, M., & Gambetta, D. (2001). Trust in Signs. In K. S. Cook (Ed.), Trust in Society (pp. 148–184). New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Bennett, W. L., Lawrence, R. G., & Livingston, S. (2007). When the Press Fails. Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 32 G. MADDALENA AND G. GILI Boorstin, D. (1961). The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Atheneum. Byrne, D. (1971). The Attraction Paradigm. New York: Academic Press. Cirino, R. (1972). Don’t Blame the People: How the News Media Use Bias, Distortion, and Censorship to Manipulate Public Opinion. New York: Random House. Coleman, J. S. (1990). Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Costa, V., & Gili, G. (2014). Sfera pubblica, pluralismo e media: tre modelli. Sociologia e politiche sociali, 17(2), 9–40. Darnton, R. (2018). La bulimia delle opinioni sta uccidendo l’informazione. Avvenire, 9/7/2018, 13. Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dayan, D., & Katz, E. (1992). Media Events. The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Edelman, M. (1964). The Symbolic Uses of Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Edelman, M. (1977). Political Language: Words that Succeed and Policies that Fails. New York: Academic Press. Edelman, M. (1988). Constructing the Political Spectacle. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Efron, E. (1971). The News Twisters. Los Angeles: Nash Publishing. Entman, R. M. (2004). Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Entman, R. M. (2012). Scandal and Silence: Media Responses to Presidential Misconduct. Cambridge: Polity Press. Esser, F., & Strömbäck, J. (Eds.). (2014). Mediatization of Politics: Understanding the Transformation of Western Democracies. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fertilio, D. (1994). Le notizie del diavolo. La parabola ignota della disinformazi- one. Milano: Spirali. Floridi, L. (2018). Artificial Intelligence, Deepfakes and a Future of Ectypes. Philosophy and Technology, 30(2), 123–129. Fracassi, C. (1996). Le notizie hanno le gambe corte. Guida alla lettura dell’informazione. Milano: Rizzoli. Gehl, R. W., & Bakardjieva, M. (2017). Socialbots and Their Friends: Digital Media and the Automation of Sociality. London and New York: Routledge. Gili, G. (2001). Il problema della manipolazione: peccato originale dei media? Milano: FrancoAngeli. Gili, G. (2005). La credibilità. Quando e perché la comunicazione ha successo. Soveria Mannelli, CZ: Rubbettino.  2 POST-TRUTH IN PRACTICE 33 Goffman, E. (1974). Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper & Row. Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Goffman, E. (1990 ). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin Books. Green, J. E. (2010). The Eyes of the People: Democracy in the Age of Spectatorship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hofstetter, C. R. (1976). Bias in the News: Network Television Coverage of the 1972 Election Campaign. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Innerarity, D. (2006). El nuovo espacio publico. Madrid: Espasa Calpe. Jack, C. (2017). Lexicon of Lies. Data & Society Research Institute, August. Jankélévitch, V. (1998). Du mensonge. Paris: Flammarion. Jones, E. E., & Wortman, C. (1973). Ingratiation: An Attributional Approach. Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press. Kalpokas, I. (2018). A Political Theory of Post-Truth. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Limburg, V. E. (1994). Electronic Media Ethics. Boston: Focal Press. Luhmann, N. (2000). The Reality of the Mass Media. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lutz, W. (1989). Doublespeak. New York: Harper & Row. Marcinkowski, F. (2014). Mediatisation of Politics: Reflections on the State of the Concept. Javnost-The Public, 21(2), 5–22. McLean, P. (2017). Culture in Networks. Cambridge: Polity Press. Meyrowitz, J. (1985). No Sense of Place. New York: Oxford University Press. Noelle-Neumann, E. (1984). The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion – Our Social Skin. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Papsdorf, C. (2015). How the Internet Automates Communication. Information, Communication & Society, 18(9), 991–1005. Pratkanis, A. R., & Aronson, E. (1992). Age of Propaganda. The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion. New York: Freeman & Co. Price, V. (1992). Public Opinion. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Ramonet, I. (1990, mars). Télévision nécrophile. Le Monde Diplomatique. Roberts, A. (2018). Churchill: Walking with Destiny. New York: Viking. Silverstone, R. (2007). Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis. London: Polity Press. Tandoc, E., Wei Lim, Z., & Ling, R. (2017). Defining ‘Fake News’. Digital Journalism, 811, 1–17. Wooley, S. (2018). The Political Economy of Bots: Theory and Method in the Study of Social Automation. In R. Kiggins (Ed.), The Political Economy of Robots (pp. 127–155). London: Palgrave Macmillan.  CHAPTER 3 Post-Truth in Theory Abstract The situation we are facing now is the result of processes that have rapidly developed over recent decades. We identify five processes that have contributed to a weakening of the concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’: (1) the exploitation of beliefs and emotions for manipulative ends as described in studies from the fields of mass psychology and sociology; (2) the rise of the postmodernist approach in many areas of the field of phi- losophy; (3) sociological perspectives that have led to various constructiv- ist approaches; (4) communication theories that fostered the social construction of reality by the media; and (5) a new conception of the work of journalists as a construction of reality rather than a representation of reality. As a component of all of these paths, we identify a foundational adherence to a natural realism in which the world of communication is considered to be a secondary reality, followed by a shift towards a con- structivist attitude in which reality coincides with communication. At the end of the chapter, we provide an appraisal of the pros and cons of these conceptual developments. Keywords Realism Constructivism Postmodernism Communication studies Mass society Journalism studies The twentieth century was characterized by two important developments that affected the world of knowledge. © The Author(s) 2020 35 G. Maddalena, G. Gili, The History and Theory of Post-Truth Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41460-3_3 36 G. MADDALENA AND G. GILI The first was the sweeping development of the psychosocial sciences, which provided for better knowledge of human intentions, motives, and behaviours. It was possible for this knowledge to be exploited by those who controlled mass media to make their communicative strategies more effective. At the same time, the research that emanated from these sciences also provided interpretative tools to those hoping to oppose these strate- gies, both theoretically, revealing their mechanisms and effects, and practi- cally, through techniques of resistance and boycott. The second important development that occurred over the course of the twentieth century was the critique of the concept of truth and refer- ence to ‘reality,’ critiques that began to characterize schools of thought in the fields of philosophy, sociology, communication studies, and journalism studies. These critiques, as we shall see, were based in part on a theoretical opposition to the simplistic definitions of truth and reality provided by positivistic thought, and in part on a politically motivated rejection of truth as being a tool consistently wielded by those in power who sought to impose their truth as the truth in defence of their interests and social hegemony. The critique of the notion of truth led to the weakening and even disappearance of every concept of truth and all references to reality, generating a series of cultural effects that were partially foreseen and pre- dictable, which we illustrate in the next chapter. 3.1   Understanding (and Exploiting) Human Motives The heart of the definition of post-truth, as has been said, is an appeal to emotions and personal beliefs in order to shape public opinion. The exploitation of beliefs and emotions for manipulative ends was widespread during the twentieth century and has been the frequent object of study in the fields of the psychology and the sociology of crowds and masses. An extensive literature developed over time whose findings did not remain confined to the halls of academia but rather exerted a great influence over the twentieth-century cultural and political debate. 3.1.1  The Mob Mentality Gustave Le Bon’s Psychologie des foules (Le Bon 2001), published in France in 1895 and translated into English the following year under the title The Crowd, is one of the most important studies in social psychology and had a  3 POST-TRUTH IN THEORY 37 massive influence on many scholars of collective phenomena, starting with Freud. The book traces its origins in, and attempts to respond to, the fear prompted by the new power of the masses that emerged over the course of the history that began with the French Revolution and during the subse- quent chapters of French and European history, including the events of 1830, 1848, and 1870 (Bourke 2005, ch. 2). Le Bon’s foundational thesis is that individuals act in a profoundly different way when by themselves than they do in a large group. Although a crowd unites individuals with vastly disparate personal and social characteristics, diverse in intelligence and education, it activates psychological and relational processes that bring to light ‘unconscious elements’—instincts, passions, and behaviours of pri- maeval origin—that are reinforced by suggestive actions and contagious ideas and sentiments. In a crowd, the ‘group mentality’ takes over, confer- ring on individuals a sense of irresponsibility and unlimited power. Le Bon describes crowds as ephemeral, impulsive, changeable, and irri- table, but also as capable of striking outbursts of generosity and self-denial; the key point, however, for our purposes is their relationship with truth: The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim…crowds are not to be influenced by reasoning, and can only comprehend rough-and-ready associations of ideas. The orators who know how to make an impression upon them always appeal in consequence to their sentiments and never to their reason. The laws of logic have no action on crowds. (Le Bon 2001, pp. 64–66) The absence of a critical spirit allows crowds to adopt wildly contradic- tory ideas. Crowds, observes Le Bon, are incapable of reflection and “are devoid of the notion of improbability; and it is to be noted that in a gen- eral way it is the most improbable things that are the most striking. This is why it happens that it is always the marvellous and legendary side of events that more specially strike crowds” (ibid., p. 40). A second quite interesting aspect of Le Bon’s argument considers the relationship between the crowd and its leaders. Le Bon’s fundamental idea is that an orator can direct and hypnotize a crowd if only he follows its tendencies and what people want and desire; the orator who, instead, “fol- lows his own line of thought, not that of his hearers,…from this fact alone 38 G. MADDALENA AND G. GILI his influence is annihilated” (ibid., p. 66). He can direct the crowd only if he is, in his turn, directed by it, even at the risk of being subsumed by it. A final point considers the most effective persuasive mechanisms. Le Bon highlights two rhetorical strategies. First of all, he states that “affir- mation pure and simple, kept free of all reasoning and all proof, is one of the surest means of making an idea enter the mind of crowds. The conciser an affirmation is, the more destitute of every appearance of proof and demonstration, the more weight it carries.” Second, he argues that affir- mation “has no real influence unless it be constantly repeated, and so far as possible in the same terms” (ibid., p. 72). Freud takes up and discusses the theme of the relationship between the individual ego and the psychology of the masses raised by Le Bon and other contemporaries in Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego (Freud 1949), developing his own unique point of view. First of all, according to Freud, each individual does not form part of a single generic mass, but of many masses, some temporary as in the case of revolutionary mobs, others long-lasting and artificial, such as the church or the army. In his view, the force that holds a mass together is not suggestion or a psychic contagion with roots in primaeval forces, as Le Bon held, nor is it the instinct towards gregariousness identified by Trotter and McDougall, nor is it the law of imitation proposed by Tarde, but rather it is an ‘affective bond’ and ‘iden- tification’ with a leader that grounds the horizontal affective bond (which is therefore secondary and derivative) between each member of the social group. This is “the libidi