30th Anniversary Gold Leaf Seminar Series

In conventional media, we have long been aware of news as satire or parody (for humorous effect) and propaganda as manipulated or misleading slants on factual content (for political advantage); more recently however, fake news, particularly in social media, has rapidly acquired notoriety, notably inspired by Donald Trump during and after the last American Presidential election. Today it has become established as a form of alternative news, deliberately meant to mislead, disinform, and misinform readers through fabricated or manipulated content. In this talk, I would like to propose a theoretically informed multiperspective approach integrating ‘interdiscursivity’ (Bhatia, 2017) and ‘discursive illusion’ (Bhatia, 2015) to account for the complexity of on-going contentious issues in alternative ‘Fake news’ prevailing in social media, and at the same time, highlight some of the key

challenges to law and free speech in today’s digitally mediated world.