Purpose The purpose of this paper is to stimulate an urgent dialogue about the impact of automated opinion engines (“bots”) on the functioning of public institutions in democratic societies. While the use of political bots may or may not have influenced the recent US presidential election or...

Purpose – To discuss the time when an overuse of a marketing perspective for a product is detrimental to the best interests of society. In this case, using marketing to drive journalistic decision results in a poorly informed electorate in which a comedy program of admitted fake news provides...

Who started it we will never know. But from the birth of newspapers, advertisers realised that the third party endorsement of apparently independent editorial reporting delivered their message more cheaply – and arguably more credibly – than paid advertising. Thus in the 17th century the...