Disinformation and the problem of ‘fake news’ are often deliberated and dissected as a problem from the prism of civil liberties, public safety, platform governance, and technological regulation. The study of ‘disinformation’ has often focused excessively on its political and social implications but not adequately on the economic cost and motivations of ‘fake news’, which is frequently underemphasised. There is a cause-and-effect relationship between market economies, the dissemination of ‘fake news’, and its economic considerations. Social media platforms rely upon paid advertisements as the major source of revenue, which in many cases entails overlooking problematic content, including disinformation and misinformation. Any attempt to address, deal with, and remedy the menace of disinformation without unpacking the ‘market’ system and economic aspects in this equation, encompassing social media platforms, digital content creators and influencers, netizens, and the government, simply amounts to missing the woods for the trees. Parallelly, a branch of ‘disinformation’ has emerged that targets companies, brands, and markets, leading to unprecedented economic loss with far-reaching implications. Technologies such as ‘deepfakes’, machine learning, generative AI, etc., contribute to the expansion of financial motivations and costs of ‘fake news’, opening myriad prospects of productive and disruptive uses. In this broad background, the present paper aims to study and investigate the market for disinformation to truly uncover the economic costs and motivations of ‘fake news’ in an attempt to regulate them effectively.
