5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

The joint session between RC 07 Futures Research and WG Digital Sociology proposes to discuss the phenomenon of disinformation in the new public sphere shaped by the battles between established media and the parallel ones created through online social networks. This new media landscape has technological and mediatic characteristics that have reshaped political life around the globe. Despite disinformation's long history, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have amplified the conditions to create and disseminate it. Fake news are just the most popular tool among the set of techniques involved in spreading disinformation. Sociological research can help to identify and understand how interest groups and other social actors create and disseminate disinformation. According to each context it can be a tool to attract attention, audience, and also political engagement. The dynamics of the new attention market has had consequences like those of promoting fear and uncertainty, reinforcing social conflict. The joint session is open to any subject of research, methodologies and analytical frames that can contribute to understand the contemporary communication battles and how disinformation emerge in them. Among the vast array of research themes are the logics that shape the new media ecosystem; framing disputes between digital influencers and professional media; political extremists movements; the role of conspiracy theories and other ways of disseminating doubt, uncertainty, and fear; scientific denialism and climate change denialism; disinformation coproducing networks during collective crisis like pandemics, climate catastrophes, and even electoral campaigns, and other phenomena of the new technomediatic public sphere.