Giglietto, F., Iannelli, L., Valeriani, A., & Rossi, L. (2019). ‘Fake news’ is the invention of a liar: How false information circulates within the hybrid news system. Current Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392119837536
Summary
Giglietto and colleagues offer a theoretical critique of the dominant creator-centric framing of “fake news,” arguing that it cannot capture how false information actually moves through Chadwick’s hybrid media system. Drawing on second-order cybernetics, Bateson’s information theory, and Luhmann’s systems theory, they propose refocusing analysis on propagators — the chain of actors who each judge and re-share content — rather than on the original injector’s intent. A three-level (micro/meso/macro) framework and a 2x2 typology of injector/propagator truth judgments allow them to reconceptualise circulation as heterogeneous cascades in which satire, mistake, and deception can flow together. They also reject the term “fake news” itself as a rhetorical weapon that positions its user as truth-claimer.
Key Contributions
- Shifts the analytical center of gravity from content creators/injectors to propagators and propagation dynamics.
- Introduces second-order cybernetics into misinformation studies, treating information as observer-dependent (“a difference that makes a difference”).
- Develops a 2x2 propagation typology based on the truth judgments of injector and propagator, yielding four cases: pure disinformation, misinformation-via-disinformation, disinformation-via-misinformation, and pure misinformation.
- Articulates a micro/meso/macro model linking individual truthfulness judgments, dyadic propagation, and emergent global cascades.
- Distinguishes lowercase true/false (actors’ judgments) from capitalized True/False (researcher assessment), staking out a constructivist-but-not-relativist position.
- Provides a normative critique of the label “fake news” as inherently divisive.
Methods
Conceptual/theoretical paper. The authors review classical and recent literature on disinformation, misinformation, rumor, propaganda, conspiracy, satire, and “bullshit”; synthesise it with von Foerster’s second-order cybernetics, Bateson, Chadwick’s hybrid media system, and Luhmann; and illustrate the resulting framework with three cases: the Veerender Jubbal doctored image after the 2015 Paris attacks, Chris Lamb’s satirical Huffington Post piece on Trump and the Statue of Liberty, and the 2016 misidentified KKK “march” photo in Mebane, NC.
Findings
- Existing definitions overweight the “generative act” and neglect what happens once content enters circulation.
- Propagators judge truth using cues from source (authority, proximity), content (confirmation bias, congruence, relevance), and context (overload, limited attention, “tweet first, verify later”).
- Authority and proximity increasingly collapse into one another on social media, degrading expertise-based evaluation.
- Original intent does not determine downstream fate: satire, honest error, and deliberate deception can all be re-propagated as true by mainstream actors.
- Real cascades are composite — no single typology (disinformation vs. misinformation) captures them.
- Societal consensus on truth is unlikely; coexisting opposing beliefs are the normal state of the hybrid news system.
Connections
This paper is a foundational conceptual anchor for propagation-oriented and typology-critical work on information disorder, and it prefigures later empirical studies of cascades and sharing behaviour such as DeVerna2025-dl, Mosleh2024-op, and Budak2024-ef. Its critique of the “fake news” label as rhetorically loaded resonates strongly with Farkas2026-lr, while its observer-dependent, systems-theoretic framing connects to sociocybernetic and audience-centred work like Grusauskaite2026-po and Marwick2025-ov. The insistence that intent alone cannot classify circulating content also anticipates concerns in Starbird2025-jj and Marwick2025-vx about participatory and emergent disinformation dynamics.