The Propaganda Machine. Social Media Bias and the Future of Democracy

The present contribution attempts to re-conceptualize propaganda drawing from a classical approach (Herman & Chomsky, 2010) and thanks to more recent contributions developed in the context of critical internet studies (Fuchs, 2012; Morozov, 2011). The global spread of social media in particular is debated as the main factor influencing the contemporary forms of propaganda. In spite of the optimist rhetoric concerning the alleged emancipating power of social media, many critics denote in fact the continuity among the mass media model of manufacturing consent and the contemporary forms of propaganda enhanced by the social media players (Facebook, Google, etc.) within the public debate. The essay wants to highlight the social media bias affecting the manipulative processes of dissemination and information sharing, and it also aims to discuss how such biases can produce the new forms of the propaganda machine: the Facebook targeted propaganda, the manipulative propaganda spread by authoritarian regimes and the computational automated propaganda.