Fake News as a Type of Manipulative Political Technologies

The article analyses and describes the phenomenon “fake news” as a type of modern manipulative media technologies. The research is based on the material of current online news resources and publications made by American politicians in social networks. “Fake news” is not a new term, but it has acquired a different meaning in the American political media discourse due to its wide use by Donald Trump. The term “fake news” has been introduced into common usage vocabulary and has become in some cases a qualifying sign of the authoritarian style of information delivery. The analysis of the material shows that, in the realities of modern American political media discourse, undesirable censored information is not simply displaced to the periphery of the informational space, but it is redundantly replaced by fake messages. In this case, fake news is making a lot of noise about some important information, creating its own event horizon. The author argues that the main aim of the strategy is to create excessive informational pressure on the basis of an emotional-cognitive unit that benefits the addressee. It has been found that the first step in creating the emotional-cognitive unit is to assign to a real fact characteristics of an event of great value. The next step is to broadly cover similar facts along with the already established emotional response of part of the audience. These facts are accepted and interpreted in the emotional context of the primary real fact.

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