Liinc em Revista is inviting submission of articles, subject to double-blind evaluation, for publication in Vol. 13, n. 2 (November 2017). We accept unpublished articles in Portuguese, Spanish and English. Author guidelines and submission form can be found here.

This issue will present a dossier on “Disinformation, misinformation and hyper-information in contemporary digital networks”, organized by Guest Editors Arthur Bezerra (Ibict), Stefania Milan (University of Amsterdam) and Fabio Malini (UFES), within the theme proposed below.

Digital networks have expanded the possibilities of information production and sharing. However, the ongoing tendencies towards hyper-information, misinformation and disinformation show how the volume and speed of diffusion, as well as the quality and reliability of the content that circulates in such networks, represent severe challenges for the social appropriation of information.

Contemporary truth regimes have become susceptible to the processes of information automation shaping online networks and social media, leading to the emergence of an algorithmic mediation of opinion formation and content distribution. Meanwhile, the population of human profiles keeps growing, contributing to the ideological spread of content (false or true). In this context, it is symptomatic that the term “post-truth” (related to circumstances in which objective facts have less influence in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal beliefs) has been elected by Oxford Dictionaries the ‘word of the year’ for 2016. Discussions about the possible transitory nature of the phenomenon do not undermine the fact that the notion and perception of truth seems to be at stake particularly when political debates are mediated by social media and other digital platforms.

This special issue wishes to explore these questions. Therefore, we intend to address topics like:

– hyper-information, disinformation, misinformation and the social production of ignorance;

– the evolution of political debate on social media;

– computational automation and network-mediated opinion production;

– machine learning and emerging methods for the study of information diffusion on digital networks;

– algorithmic filtering of information;

– algorithmization of social network relationships, belief production and truth regimes;

– “post-truth”: analysis and critique of the term;

– information literacy and critical information literacy;

– ethics in the production of information.