Intervening Troubled Marketplace of Ideas: How to Redeem Trust in Media and Social Institutions From Pseudo-Information

Abstract

Today’s public sphere is largely shaped by a dynamic digital public space where lay people conform a commodified marketplace of ideas. Individuals trade, create, and generate information, as well as consume others’ content, whereby information as public space commodity splits between this type of content and that provided by the media, and governmental institutions. This paper first explains how and why our current digital media context opens the door to pseudo-information (i.e., misinformation, disinformation, etc.). Furthermore, the paper introduces several concrete empirical efforts in the literature within a unique volume that attempt to provide specific and pragmatic steps to tackle pseudo-information, reducing the potential harm for established democracies that today’s digital environment may elicit by fueling an ill-informed society.