ABSTRACT
Research on disinformation concentrates a growing interest in the design of deepfakes and the possible political, economic and social implications of their viral dissemination on social networks. However, as much or more worrying are the cheapfakes: the hoaxes created by the users themselves through the native features of their mobile devices, the rude manipulation of pre-existing files or the simple addition of text that alters the original meaning of the shared messages. The objective of this research is to analyze the degree of technological complexity of the disinformation that circulated in Argentina during 2020 throughout social networks, as well as the role that the text played in its creation. For this, a content analysis is applied to a corpus made up of the 201 denials referring to the disinformative material that was released during that year by the fact-checking platform Chequeado, the only one accredited by the International Fact-Checking Network in the country. With the results we propose a curve of technical complexity of disinformation that shows the absolute predominance of hoaxes associated with very low, low or medium digital skills. This proves that cheapfakes are much more popular on social media than those desinformative content created professionally or through artificial intelligence. In addition, it is found that falsehoods are essentially created through captions or the insertion of text in the images, whose main function is to disinform about events or specific facts through the dissemination of wrong data or the omission of other true ones.
ABSTRACT
Disinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic has reached such a magnitude that the situation has been described as infodemic. The aim of this research is to analyze the intentions of such disinformation on social networks and its relationship with the sources, topics, main actors, and emotional appeals of the hoaxes. To this end, we conducted a content analysis on the 548 pandemic-related disinformation published between 1January 2020 and 30 June 2021 by the fact-checking media platforms Chequeado, in Argentina, and Newtral, in Spain. The results show that disinformation about COVID-19 has similar characteristics in both countries, except in sources' case, which is consistent with the transnational nature of the infodemic. The hoaxes seek, above all, to destabilise;negationism is the most frequent issue;the most common protagonists are health institutions and professionals, and negative emotional appeals prevail, especially anger, used with polarizing objectives, and fear, whose incorporation pursues destabilising and chaos-fuelling purposes. The appeal to positive emotions is reserved, for fake content with reputational or informative objectives. Furthermore, a statistical correlation is observed between the inferred intention of disinformation and the rest of the variables. The findings of this study lead to the conclusion that the infodemic had the same transnational character as the pandemic, which would suggest that disinformation on a global agenda item uses shared parameters for its propagation in different scenarios.
ABSTRACT
Hybrid media context and the infodemic have increased the threat of disinformation, particularly among young people who mostly consume digital content. This article aims to identify the competencies needed to detect low-quality content linked to disinformation by Journalism and Communications undergraduates from Argentina, Chile, and Spain. Based on a double comparative study by countries and levels of education, it tries to predict the skills of future journalists in recognising false information. From an online questionnaire, the participants (N=300) evaluated the quality observed (minimum, average or excellent) and the problems detected from 12 items published in both conventional and pseudo-media. The comparison of results with the expert group shows that about 60% of the students have difficulties in identifying quality accurately and that this ability is higher in the advanced groups. From a selection of five news items, the participants were only able to successfully report 25.3% of the real mistakes in the texts. The correct identification of these mistakes improves in news related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Conclusions reveal that undergraduates overestimate their ability to detect disinformation, with a self-perception of 3.46 out of 5. The results also indicate that their media diet combines digital media and social media as a priority, while traditional media have a residual nature.