From newsmaking to newsfaking. A transmedia opportunity for disinformation

Fake news appear to be one of the most relevant and widespread phenomena characterising media landscape in the last few years, to the point that several fundamental international political and social events, such as the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States of America and the Brexit referendum, are considered to have been strongly influenced by the dissemination of fake contents. However, the concept of fake news has been so discussed, in the academic literacy as well as within the public debate, that it has been associated with numerous occurrences and events, often different one another. From satire to click-baiting, from lack of journalistic verification to conspiracy theories, in the span between the two terms (fake and news), interpreted as opposite extremes, different types of content exist. All of them, nonetheless, have to sound likely and to appear like journalistic contents; are produced for economic and/or ideological reasons; are potentially viral (Allcott, Gentzkow 2017 ). The involved media platforms are also a recurrent common point in the analysis of the fake news phenomenon. The development of social network sites influenced and encouraged their diffusion and reinforcement, but nonetheless fake contents often reach other media, including mainstream news media such as newspapers and newscasts. An analysis of this phenomenon cannot abstract from considering the technological impact of communication habitats (Ciofalo, Leonzi 2013), able to activate forms of amplification (related for example to profilation, such as filter bubble, echo chamber, etc.), and the essential role played by simple users who believe, disseminate and share contents (Tandoc Jr., Lim and Ling 2017). Two key issues emerge from this framework. On the one hand, the relationship of the fake news phenomenon with the main journalistic value represented by “telling the truth” (Schudson 1998; Hallin, Mancini 2004; Spalletta 2011), and in particular the strict relation with the concept of posttruth, which appears frequently in the literature (Ferraris 2017; Lorusso 2018; Gili, Maddalena 2018). On the other hand, the narrative strategies used by the fake contents producers to maximise the content’s spreadability and impact, which involve media but also a specific storytelling (Jenkins, Ford and Green 2013).