Desinformación y poder. Alquimias de la persuasión is the latest title in the ‘Aldea Global’ collection, which is co-published by the university publishers: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Universitat Jaume I, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Universitat de València. The book is the work of Raúl Rodríguez Ferrándiz, Professor of Semiotics of Mass Communication at the University of Alicante, who specialises in post-truth politics, disinformation, conspiracy theories and ‘fake news’.
In Desinformación y poder. Alquimias de la persuasión, the author dismantles the slogan ‘information is power’, to open our eyes to a current media society where truth has become the true value that is traded on the market: it is privatised, viralised and monetised without any relation to the facts. This book provides a brief introduction to ‘trumpology’, the Cambridge Analytica case and computational propaganda, the Pizzagate case and the role of Wikileaks, but also refers to those who contribute to polarisation by attacking immigration, feminism or LGTBI rights. It discusses the content (in)moderation strategies of Facebook and X, and the advertisers who fund, often unwittingly, pseudo-media that spread misleading news or promote hate, the conspiracies that lied with the ‘plandemia’ story when the virus arrived, and now continue to deny climate change or scare with the Great Replacement. It analyses our penchant for rumours and novelistic lies and for sharing them for a handful of ‘likes’. Finally, a coda is dedicated to the DANA that hit the province of Valencia and Trump's second victory in the US elections.
The work has been selected by the Unión de Editoriales Universitarias Españolas (UNE) to star in the twenty-sixth episode of its podcast ‘Libros para comprender’. The episode is a conversation with Raúl Rodríguez Ferrándiz and Maite Simón, author and editor of PUV (Publicaciones de València), respectively. The programme can be listened to on the main podcasting platforms (Spotify, Apple Podcast, YouTube Podcast and iVoox) and also seen on YouTube Podcast, through the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1daLMPUbjk.
A presentation of the book is scheduled for Thursday 13 February at 7 p.m. at the Documenta bookshop in Barcelona (Calle de Pau Claris, 144).
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