2021
Cairn
Julien Giry, « Fake news as a social science concept: : Scoping paper on the related concepts of rumors, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and disinformation », Questions de communication, ID : 10670/1.4c6045...
Named 2017’s Word of the Year by the Collins Dictionary—mostly for Donald Trump’s uses of it—fake news has become a huge topic for the social sciences, leading to many debates among scholars and academics. Is it something new or merely a buzzword for well-known and widely studied phenomena such as rumors, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and disinformation? Put differently, is fake news a social science concept? This paper aims to frame fake news as an analytical tool and category for a relatively autonomous social fact since, in addition to its info-communicational aspects, it is located at the intersection of the notions mentioned above.