Fake news is not a new problem in communication. Deceptive communication has always existed: after the first sin recounted in the Bible, Adam and Eve clumsily try to hide their transgression from God; soon afterwards, Cain once again tries to deceive God about the murder of his brother Abel. The insightful scholar Gregory Bateson (1972; Italian trans. 1976, pp. 160–161) observed that animals communicate with a naturalness and innocence that human beings have lost, since human behaviour "is corrupted by deceit — even self-deceit — by purpose, and by self-consciousness." The capacity to lie is therefore bound up with the superior cognitive abilities of human beings and presupposes a high degree of awareness and reflexivity. This makes human communication immensely richer and more multifaceted than animal communication, but at the same time more demanding, opaque, duplicitous, and exposed to the risk of domination and deception.
Tracing back through the history of fake news, the historian Robert Darnton (2017) assembled a selection of cases ranging from the early Middle Ages to eighteenth-century France, among which the malicious rumours that shaped the reputation and fate of Queen Marie Antoinette are particularly striking. Again with reference to France, the historian of the Revolution Georges Lefebvre devoted a famous book to the phenomenon of the "Great Fear", which spread with lightning speed through certain rural regions in the summer of 1789 on the basis of unchecked rumours about an aristocratic conspiracy, an imminent foreign invasion, and bands of brigands who were killing people and destroying crops; these rumours led the peasants to arm themselves and rise up against the aristocracy (1932).
But all ages have had their share of fake news, including important cases, such as the forged Donation of Constantine, a medieval apocryphal document used to legitimise the temporal power of the Church and only debunked many centuries later, in 1517, by the humanist Lorenzo Valla on the basis of its historical and linguistic inconsistencies.
Translated from G. Gili e G. Maddalena, Post-verità e fake news: radici, significati attuali, inattesi protagonisti e probabili vittime, in Media Education. Studi, ricerche e buone pratiche, 9 (2018), pp. 1-16
According to the text, the phenomenon of fake news:
A) Is the result of a historical process that began in the Middle Ages
B) Has deep historical roots, but technically began in 1789
C) Acquired a different role in the modern age, because only in the modern age have people come to understand that human beings and animals are distinct
D) Is due to the human capacity to always distinguish the truth
E) Has always existed, albeit in different forms