Post-verità, vaccini, democrazia

ABSTRACTAfter the international events of Brexit and the election of the Pre-sident of the USA Donald Trump, the issue of post-truth, which is often conductive to populist drifts, has reached the center of the poli-tical debate. On a daily basis, con-servancy theories and fake news fueled by the web come to shape the learning capabilities of new ge-nerations, altering their ability to judge and analyze digital textual sources. In such a cultural context, techno-scientic and biomedical innovations represent privileged ¿HOGV LQ ZKLFK WKH PHFKDQLVPV RI post-truth have come to shape the social perception of risk and the decisional architecture of citizens. Several studies on the growing so-cial resistances toward vaccination readily exemplify the neurocognitive attitudes and the typical dynamics of the web underlining the diffusion of post-factual information. In the case of vaccines, not only our sensitivity and personal convictions take over YHUL¿DEOH GDWD EXW LQIRUPDWLRQ QRZ globalized, is characterized by an unprecedented velocity of propa-gation, which distributes it in viral waves and across social groups (tribal clusters) ready to relaunch a continuous stream of counter-in- formation and mutually ignored de-QLDOV FRQ¿UPDWLRQ ELDV DQG EDFN¿UH bias), where the sources are often lacking a geographical reference and a author and competences are ignored or mocked (disintermedia-tion and false balance bias). Lastly, this text proposes an essential hi-storical analysis, in which post-truth is seen as a cyclic form of anti-in-tellectualism, the recent product of a less recent post-modern relativism, which is now revealing its hazardou-sness in refuting competences, in polluting of the rules of the normal democratic discourse and in the de-magogical support toward new for-ms of direct democracy provided by the web