Using International Relations Theories to Understand Disinformation

Concerns about disinformation have witnessed extraordinary growth since the mid-2010s, despite the spread of false and distorted messages in the public arena not being a new phenomenon. In 2016, the Oxford Dictionary declared “post-truth” its word of the year, highlighting a historical and political time in which disinformation strategies reached new heights, fueled by the hybridization of the communicative ecosystem (Chadwick 2017) in a context of increasing polarization and populism. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the Brexit referendum the same year were milestones in the awareness of the role that manipulative messages play and their effects on political decisions, particularly in times of crisis. from another of these networks’ inherent characteristics: their ability to dis- criminate and stratify the public according to the most diverse criteria (Wagner and Boczkowski 2019). Any person or company with a sufficiently large and specialized database can now distribute content among the public according to multiple criteria, allowing much more to be known about their tastes, hobbies, opinions, etc. than in the past. In fact, data on the public’s participation on social networks (who they follow, in which groups they participate, what content they share, etc.) are one of the main ele- ments that help increase the effectiveness of the messages sent to the public. The snowball of disinformation can, in fact, sustain itself and improve its effectiveness in each wave