Kelly Janaína Souza da SILVA
Abstract. In light of recent debates on “post-truth”, “post-facts”, “fake news”, and other contemporary phenomena that cover the issue of lying in politics, Arendt‟s work provides precious reflections on the relationship between truth and politics. The last few years have seen significant changes in how citizens communicate and appear in public to be seen and heard by everybody. Social media such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have become essential tools for expressing and sharing opinions, ideas, preferences, and thinking. Social Media affordances heavily shape and impose the manners we interact with each other, leading many users of these networks to consider their expressions in them as effective political participation. Despite this situation‟s undoubted advances, the contemporary obsession with social media may reflect just “a form of world-alienation in interrelated ways”. The character of the world as a set of facts and objects
agreed upon and recognized by our common senses, unequivocally affirmed by Arendt, is then impaired since alienation is one of the great threats to the preservation of the common world. In our article, Arendt‟s notion of world alienation is put to bear on social media phenomena most closely associated with the post-truth condition: manipulation of factual truths, lying in political discourse, and misinformation dissemination techniques on social media platforms. This work aims to present the main aspects of Arendt‟s thought that are consistent with contemporary phenomena that involve truth and lies in politics, shedding light in particular on the question of world-alienation amplified by social media techniques.
Keywords: Social Media & Post-truth, World Alienation, (Lie in) Politics, Hannah Arendt