Introduction: The Genesis of Dupery by Design

Online fake news, misinformation, disinformation campaigns, and computational propaganda are all problematic, posing threats to democracy, undermining trust, and increasing polarisation. In the introduction to this edited collection, Dupery by Design: The Epistemology of Deceit in a Postdigital Era, we discuss the genesis of the book. The scale, speed, amplification and quality of ‘information’ that spreads across social media, particularly the harms of deceit on individuals and the polity drew our attention. Technologies and social media platforms in particular create both new norms for discourse, radically alter a priori notions of ‘public sphere’, and enable new forms of power and inequality to exist. The reasons why and how people deceive are complex, lacking unified understanding, and this collection offers some insight into these processes. The contributors to this collection demonstrate in highly diverse ways that deception is a pervasive feature of human interactions, and takes diverse forms, ranging from the cynical to the artistic and humorous. The collection contributes the growing field of postdigital scholarship.