Doctors for the Truth: Echo Chambers of Disinformation, Hate Speech, and Authority Bias on Social Media

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has been the catalyser of one of the most prolific waves of disinformation and hate speech on social media. Amid an infodemic, special interest groups, such as the international movement of “Doctors for the Truth”, grew in influence on social media, while leveraging their status as healthcare professionals and creating true echo chambers of COVID-19 false information and misbeliefs, supported by large communities of eager followers all around the world. In this paper, we analyse the discourse of the Portuguese community on Facebook, employing computer-assisted qualitative data analysis. A dataset of 2542 textual and multimedia interactions was extracted from the community and submitted to deductive and inductive coding supported by existing theoretical models. Our investigation revealed the high frequency of negative emotions, of toxic and hateful speech, as well as the widespread diffusion of COVID-19 misbeliefs, 32 of which are of particular relevance in the national context.