Disinformation in the Technomediatic Public Sphere

The joint session proposes to discuss the phenomenon of disinformation in the new public sphere shaped by online social networks. This public sphere has technological and mediatic characteristics that have reshaped political life around the globe. Despite disinformation's long history, information and communication technologies 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 disinformation and with which objectives. According to each context it can be a tool to attract political engagement with expected or unexpected consequences like those of reinforcing polarizatizion and social conflict. The joint session is open to any subject of research, methodologies and analytic frames that can contribute to understand the contemporary forms of disinformation. Among the vast array of research themes connected to disinformation are anti-vaccine movements; extreme-right and leftist versions of conspiracy theories; the anti-mask use movement during covid 19 pandemic; scientific denialism; climate change denialism; disinformation campaigns forged to achieve economic and/or legal aims like those created by cancerogenous industries; political subjects, political agency and collective action in the technomediac public sphere.