Fake news and the maintenance of the political public sphere: Disinformation as a Threat to Human Rights and Democracy

Abstract

The spread of fake news is not a modern phenomenon, although the term “fake news” has recently gained notoriety. History shows that the manipulation of information has always been a tool of domination, used to distort reality and seize power. From a philosophical perspective, politics arises from the creation of a public space for debate, where free individuals engage in dialogue and make collective decisions, as opposed to the isolation of private life. Hannah Arendt was instrumental in investigating how totalitarian regimes sought to undermine this public space in order to exercise control. With technological advances, attacks on the public space have become more modern. Currently, the dissemination of fake news in the virtual environment occurs rapidly and without prior control, fragmenting the space for dialogue and replacing it with extremism, isolation, and hate speech. Given this, this work starts from the following question: how does the dissemination of fake news contribute to eroding the public political space? A qualitative approach is adopted, using exploratory procedures and bibliographic methods, based on articles and academic texts on political freedom in Arendt, seeking to understand how her theory helps explain the phenomenon of fake news. The objective is to use Arendtian thought as a theoretical lens to analyze this contemporary dynamic. After discussing the impact of fake news on the public sphere, the work revisits its historical use as a constant threat to democracy, highlighting the need for regulation. It concludes that the preservation of the public sphere requires not only legal measures against disinformation, but above all, citizen awareness of the political role of information and an ethical commitment to the truth.