Divided Society: Crisis in Europe and "Fake News"

Over the last decade the EU has experienced successive waves of crises. This session presents a unique blend of theoretical and empirical analysis to assess the extent to which the EU’s crises are interdependent and have an underlying common cause: processes of commodification and the increasing use of the market mechanism as a system of governance within the EU. Critically applying Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation to the process of European integration, the research radically redefines the debate on the EU by analysing the limits, and consequences, of a market-led model of integration.

Although we may think of it as a modern problem, particularly in the context of social media, Jay Owens argues that fake news really isn't a tech problem: it's a social and political one. If we look at how "misinformation" spreads, particularly around the 2016 US election campaign, it isn’t generated or spread by the media, but by us.

Jay will discuss the propagation of “Fake News”, which has a longer history than we might think, including:
• 16th & 17th century pamphlets
• The Cottingley Fairies faked photograph
• Photoshop, deepfake videos and audio faking