The Post-truth World, Disinformation-hindering Strategies, and Visual Aspects of Disinformation

This chapter situates contemporary disinformation within the “post-truth” condition, in which believability is privileged over factual accuracy and political falsehood escapes traditional sanction. It argues that while social media have democratized information dissemination, they have simultaneously become instruments of deception threatening democratic processes and institutional trust. The chapter first shows that post-truth is not novel, tracing its roots to nineteenth-century yellow journalism and to theorists such as Postman and Baudrillard. It then clarifies conceptual boundaries, favoring Wardle and Derakshan’s distinction among mis-, dis-, and malinformation over the politicized term “fake news,” and reviews several major taxonomies of deceptive content to identify shared themes. Subsequent sections examine how generative AI both amplifies disinformation and aids detection, analyze conspiracy narratives as a distinct subgenre with documented harms (including COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in Romania), and survey the psychological and societal effects of exposure to falsehood. The chapter concludes by mapping countermeasures—prebunking grounded in inoculation theory, fact-checking and debunking, algorithmic detection, and slow journalism—while noting their limitations and the absence of any single effective intervention. It positions media literacy and critical thinking as the thesis’s central long-term strategy.