Information and Democracy: Fake News as Emotional Weapon

Despite continued normative insistence in the Social Sciences, individuals’ access to and use of information has failed to be linked unequivocally to higher quality democratic outcomes. At the same time, ample evidence has been presented that the internet and social media in particular, continue to undermine rather than strengthen any substantive link between information and democracy. This chapter posits that fake news is the description of strategic emotional weapons that cultivates political division in order to maintain the status quo. Yet, despite this, fake news is merely a covariate, rather than a determinant, of the failed linkage between information and democracy.