On Politics and Pandemic: How Do Chilean Media Talk about Disinformation and Fake News in Their Social Networks?

Abstract

Citizens get informed, on a daily basis, from social networks in general and from the media in particular. Accordingly, the media are increasingly expressing their concern about phenomena related to disinformation. This article presents an analysis of the social networks of 159 Chilean media that, over 5 years, referred to fake news or disinformation on 10,699 occasions. Based on data science strategies, the Queltehue platform was programmed to systematically track the information posted by 159 media on their social networks (Instagram, Facebook and Twitter). The universe of data obtained (13 million news items) was filtered with a specific query to reach 10,699 relevant posts, which underwent textual computer analysis (LDA) complemented with manual strategies of multimodal discourse analysis (MDA). Among the findings, it is revealed that the recurrent themes over the years have mostly referred to fake news and politics and fake news related to health issues. This is widely explained on the grounds of a political period in Chile which involved at least five electoral processes, in addition to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Regarding the multimodal analysis, it is observed that when the dissemination of fake news involves well-known figures such as politicians or government authorities, an image or a video in which such figure appears is used. In these cases, two phenomena occur: (a) these figures have the opportunity to rectify their false or misinforming statements or (b) in most cases, their statements are reiterated and end up reinforcing the controversy. In view of these results, it seems necessary to ask whether this is all that can be done and whether this is enough that communication can do to guarantee healthy and democratic societies.