The media and information disorder in the post-truth era

In this Prishtina Talks presentation, Festim Rizanaj — a media scholar from Prizren with a doctorate from Anadolu University in Turkey and head of the “Hibrid” project for filtering and identifying disinformation — takes up in depth the concept of “post-truth” and what it means for the media landscape today.

Rizanaj begins with the genesis of the term, named word of the year 2016 by the Oxford Dictionary after Donald Trump's campaign and the Brexit referendum, where disinformation and fake news played a decisive part, and develops the concept of “post-truth politics”, in which conviction, ideology and emotion come out ahead of the verified fact. He examines the different categories of “information disorder” — misinformation, disinformation, malinformation — and uses the Russian narrative about “biological weapons in Ukraine” as the paradigmatic case of doubt produced on purpose.

In the second half, Rizanaj turns to the transformation of the media in the age of Facebook and Google: how we moved from a system in which the journalist was “the authority on the news” to one in which the technology platforms are now the chief intermediaries, how the “information bubbles” work that give a user only what confirms what he already believes, and how clickbait and the manipulation of facts have eroded the credibility of the traditional media. The lecture closes with the practical question of how professional journalism can answer this new reality — by becoming a verifier of facts more than a producer of them.

Some of the points covered: 📌 Post-truth as the Oxford Dictionary's word of the year 2016 📌 The Trump campaign and Brexit as the paradigmatic cases 📌 Post-truth politics: conviction and emotion ahead of the fact 📌 The categories of information disorder: mis-, dis-, malinformation 📌 The Russian narrative about “biological weapons” in Ukraine 📌 From the journalist as authority to the platforms as intermediaries 📌 Information bubbles, and selective confirmation 📌 The erosion of media credibility, and the new role of the verifier

📍 Prishtina Talks