“The Enemy of My Enemy Is (Not) My Friend”: A More-Than-Economic Inquiry into Fighting Private Fake News with Public Propaganda
Author:Octavian-Dragomir Jora, Mihaela Iacob, Ștefan-Dominic Georgescu, Georgiana Camelia Georgescu and Vlad I. Roșca
JEL:B50, D82, D83, D72; P16
DOI:10.24818/EA/2026/73/859
Keywords:fake news, public propaganda, truth management, epistemic governance, Information Economics, Austrian Economics, Public Choice Theory, media pluralism, informational resilience, fact-checking.
Abstract:
The rapid proliferation of private fake news has revived calls for stronger public intervention in the governance of information. Yet the institutional response often raises a paradox of its own: can decentralized falsehood legitimately be countered through centralized truth management without reproducing the very pathologies it seeks to eliminate? This scientific essay addresses that dilemma by examining the economic, ethical, and epistemological foundations of the relationship between private fake news and public propaganda. Rather than treating them as simple opposites, it argues that they represent competing institutional responses to the persistent problem of epistemic uncertainty. Building upon contributions from Austrian Economics, Information Economics, Public Choice, Institutional Economics, and Behavioural Economics, the paper develops an “Economics+” framework for observing information disorders. It further reviews a series of internationally recognized empirical indicators and databases capable of approximating the institutional environments within which truth and falsehood, as well as unreliable plots and official narratives compete for public legitimacy. The analysis suggests that economics cannot determine what truth is, but it can illuminate the knowledge constraints, informational asymmetries, incentive structures, institutional arrangements, and behavioural mechanisms, which shape its production and consumption. The conclusion is that combating falsehood should not imply manufacturing official verity, open societies being advised to preserve institutional arrangements capable to correct error without monopolizing speech, thence avoiding both the “informational anarchy” (of freely floating falsities) and the “epistemic bastille” (of authoritarian ministries of truth).