Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy: Mapping the Politics of Falsehood

The new edition of Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy offers an updated overview and critical discussion of contemporary discourses around truth, misinformation, and democracy, while also mapping cutting-edge scholarship.

Through in-depth analyses of news articles, commentaries, academic publications, policy briefs, and political speeches, the book engages with the underlying normative ideas that shape how fake news is being addressed across the globe. Doing so, it provides an innovative, critical contribution to contemporary debates on democracy, post-truth, and politics.

• Three new chapters: Chapter 2 provides an outline of the scholarly field of research into fake news; Chapter 5 examines how issues of fake news and (mis)information have become intertwined with contemporary crisis events; and Chapter 9 presents democratic alternatives to post-truth solutionism.
• A new foreword by Professor Sarah Banet-Weiser.
• Fully updated examples and studies from contemporary events, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States Capitol attack, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
• Extended discussions on the causes of democratic decline, currently proposed solutions to fake news, and democratic alternatives to our current predicament.

Interesting, informative, and well documented, Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy continues its commitment to understand and engage with the current state and future of democracy.

Johan Farkas is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen. He is part of the project "Tell Me the Truth: Fact-Checkers in an Age of Epistemic Instability" funded by the Carlsberg Foundation.

Jannick Schou holds a PhD from the IT University of Copenhagen. He is the author of several monographs on questions of politics, citizenship, and democracy.