Books
Social Media and Post-Truth World Order
With over 500 citations and 25.000 digital downloads, my 2020 book Social Media and the Post-Truth World Order has become a key reference in the fields of disinformation, political communication and geopolitics.
This book discusses post-truth politics not merely as a Western issue, but as a political and cultural condition with global ramifications. By locating the roots of the phenomenon in the trust crisis suffered by liberal democracy and its institutions, the book argues that post-truth serves as a space for ideological conflicts and geopolitical power struggles that are reshaping the world order.
“Social Media and the Post-Truth World Order is a welcome contribution to a growing body of theory and empirical analysis in post-truth studies.” —Jayson Harsin, The American University of Paris, France
“In this book, Gabriele Cosentino masterfully addresses perhaps the greatest lacuna in post-truth studies by demonstrating its global nature.” Ignas Kalpokas, Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania
The Infodemic
What caused the Covid-19 pandemic, a natural spillover event or an accident in a Wuhan laboratory? Were the mitigation measures imposed by many governments – such as lockdowns and mask-wearing mandates – based on scientific evidence, or rather aimed at curtailing civil liberties and disrupting economic activities, under the secret maneuvering of a global cabal of politicians and financiers?
These questions and speculations, some legitimate, some dubious, have been swirling around the globe through social media, alternative information outlets, instant messaging apps, and mainstream media since the beginning of the pandemic, feeding the ‘Infodemic’ – an overwhelming surge of information, misinformation, rumours and conspiracy theories which continue to linger in public and private discourse
Framing the Infodemic as a complex, multi-layered phenomenon with vast geopolitical implications, Gabriele Cosentino reveals the global competition for control in twenty-first century geopolitics between Western liberal democracies and non-Western autocracies, and above all between the United States and China
“Cosentino achieves something incredibly impressive with The Infodemic, succinctly and coherently distilling crucial elements of a complex information ecosystem that roiled the world for over two years” Marc Owen Jones, Northwestern University in Qatar
Gabriele Cosentino 