Сдается мнѣ, будто fake news какъ понятіе, описанное въ агиткѣ ниже, – само плодъ теоріи заговора.
The concept of ‘fake news’, along with a more eloquent term describing the same subject (‘post-truth’), emerged within the political and academic tradition alogside the U.S. presidential campaign in 2016. The term ‘fake news’ itself has been occasionally used by academics and journalists years before, however, the modern version of ‘fake news’ became a complex subject of discussions and research after 2016. In general, it is rare that a new concept of academic analysis makes its way into popular culture and day-to-day language. Within just a couple of years (2016-2018), the usage of the term spiked. […]
[W]e argue that conspiracy thinking plays an important, if not a crucialm role in the advent and proliferation of the so-called ‘fake news’ phenomenon and vice versa regardless of what particular attribution we use. Zonis and Joseph [‘Conspiracy thinking in the Middle East’, Political Psychology, 15(3): 443-59] suggest that conspiracy theories are ‘commonly defined as explanatory beliefs of how multiple actors meet in secret agreement in order to achieve a hidden goal that is widely considered to be unlawful or malevolent’. ‘Fake news’, meanwhile, comes in many forms and attributions: As (1) intentionally deceptive communication practice by rogue actors who falsify, forge, distort or invent information for the public (see, for example, Peters et al. (eds.) Post-truth, fake news: viral modernity & higher education, Singapore: Springer, 2018: 3–12) , as (2) a concept of adversarial (to politician, ideology or country/nation) mass media that ‘lies’ to the public or ‘conceals truth’ about a particular policy, politician, cause, country or any other entity (Kalb, M. Enemy of the people: Trump’s war on the press, the new McCarthyism, and the threat to American democracy, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2018).
At least in part, both facets of ‘fake news’ attribution commonly exploit all or partial features of the conspiracy theory logic: For attribution (1), conspiracy theories work as a fertile ground of deception and falsification; for attribution (2), the narrative mechanisms of a conspiracy theory is applied to an invented vicious ‘plot’ against a public figure, idea or even country. Also, we argue that ‘fake news’ and conspiracy thinking create a loopback cycle as the former constantly provides an input to well-known conspiracy narratives by inventing and distributing lies (or any other form of deception and disinformation) that conspiracy theory peddlers immediately appropriate and include as a ‘proof’ to whatever they believe in and what they want others to believe.
K.Avramov, V. Gatov, I. Yablokov – Conspiracy Theories and Fake News, in Paranoia within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation (1999), pp. 513-4