The Fake News Ecosystem and the Issue of Responsibility: Veles-Macedonia Production, Tech Platform Distribution, and American Consumption
The Fake News Ecosystem and the Issue of Responsibility: Veles-Macedonia Production, Tech Platform Distribution, and American Consumption

Summary/Abstract: “Creators, consumers, and arbiters of disinformation have a reinforcing effect on each other. This leads to a fake news ecosystem” (Kshetri, Voas 5). We take this observation as our point of departure to explore the issue of responsibility of the main actors within a given fake news ecosystem: content producers, platform distributors, and consuming audiences. We undertook an empirical research in Veles, Macedonia where there is a large community of fake news producers, in order to have a first-hand understanding of the phenomena. The paper aims to ask two main questions: Q1) Whose responsibility is it for fake news: the producer’s, the distributor’s, the user’s? and Q2) How is responsibility distributed? The working hypothesis is that the producers, the consumers and the arbiters of disinformation have a reinforcing effect upon one other that make them function in a vicious circle that allows for the production, reproduction and dissemination of fake news.

• Details
• Contents