Politics of Disinformation. Группа авторов

and audience attitudes,” held by the University of Valencia in June 2019. We also want to thank the IAMCR for its support and several Spanish institutions for their financial aid, such as the Junta de Andalucía (SEJ612 - “MEDIO: Media & Data Innovation”), Generalitat Valenciana (AICO2020/224 - “Ecology of Disinformation”) and the Ministry of Science of Spain (refs. CSO-2016-81882REDT - “Excellence Network: Digital Journalism”; PID2019-108956RB100 - “The Impact of Disinformation in Journalism: Contents, Professional Routines and Audiences”; PID2020-113574RB-I00: “Disinformation flows, polarization and crisis of media intermediation”; RTI2018-095775-BC44).

      References

      1 Allcott, H.and Gentzkow, M.(2017). Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. Journal of Economic Perspectives 31 (2): 211–236.

      2 Chadwick, A.(2017). The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power. New York: Oxford University Press.

      3 Flynn, D.J., Nyhan, B., and Reifler, J.(2017). The nature and origins of misperceptions: understanding false and unsupported beliefs about politics. Political Psychology 38: 127–150.

      4 Gottfried, J.and Shearer, E.(2017). Americans’ online news use is closing in on TV news use. Pew Research Center, 7.

      5 Horta Ribeiro, M., Calais, P.H., Almeida, V.A., and Meira Jr., W.(2017). Everything I disagree with is #fakenews”: correlating political polarization and spread of misinformation. DS+J’17, Halifax.

      6 Lewandowsky, S., Ecker, U.K., and Cook, J.(2017). Beyond misinformation: understanding and coping with the “post-truth” era. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition 6 (4): 353–369.

      7 Spence, P.R., Lachlan, K.A., Edwards, A., and Edwards, C.(2016). Tweeting fast matters, but only if I think about it: information updates on social media. Communication Quarterly 64 (1): 55–71.

      8 Tucker, J., Guess, A., Barbera, P., et al. (2018). Social media, political polarization, and political disinformation: a review of the scientific literature (19 March 2018). doi: 10.2139/ssrn.3144139.

      9 Wagner, C.and Boczkowski, P.(2019). The reception of fake news: the interpretations and practices that shape the consumption of perceived misinformation. Digital Journalism 7 (7): 870–885.

Part I Theoretical Approaches to Disinformation

1 Disinformation Matters Analyzing the Academic Production

       Nereida Cea, Bella Palomo

      University of Málaga,Spain

      Introduction

      The experts predict that in 2022 the citizens of developed countries will be consuming more disinformation than genuine news, because lies are 70% more likely to go viral and be retweeted in comparison with verified information (Vosoughi et al. 2018). It is estimated that 115 fabricated stories favoring Donald Trump were shared on Facebook a total of 30 million times during the 2016 US presidential election (Allcott and Gentzkow 2017). This figure confirms the impact attained by isolated content, disseminated on alternative rather than traditional news channels. This is shaping a dangerous news diet that can generate distrust toward the media and damage the democratic quality of society by encouraging civic apathy, destabilization, chaos (Waisbord 2018), a reduction of pluralism, and a strengthening of polarized communities in which fake news and conspiracy theories are freely propagated. Specialized approaches also warn of a decline of scientific culture in the age of fake news, threatening the scientific and economic progress of Western countries (Elías 2019).

      Audiences are conscious of the ambiguity, lack of control, and weakness that accompany the hybrid media system in which such practices have come to maturity. This is why one of their main concerns is the manipulation of journalistic news stories to serve political or economic interests, as the Reuters Institute Digital News Report testified in 2018. This panorama explains why disinformation has become the principal challenge and concern in communication in the twenty-first century, and why its transmedia and cross-border dimension requires public policies and specific training in order to limit its spread.

The scientific community has reacted actively, since academic attention can contribute to sustainable digital development by designing solutions that lead to an innovative society that is also reflexive, responsible, and secure, in the context of an unprecedented transformation in communication patterns. This chapter confirms that studies linked to disinformation have become a fertile and priority line of research. This intensity of production respects the proposal made by the High Level Group on Fake News and Online Information of the European Commission to formulate continuous investigation on the issue in order to evaluate the measures adopted by the different actors.

      Mapping recent developments in the scholarship on fake news and misinformation has previously been undertaken in the sphere of health (Wang et al. 2019), selectively in the area of communication (Jankowski 2018; Tandoc et al. 2018), and by applying an interdisciplinary approach that involved disciplines like psychology, economics, and political science as well as communication (Ha et al. 2019), analyzing investigations registered on the databases of Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, and Pubmed. The novelty of the present chapter lies in the breadth of the sample used, since previous review articles had examined between 2 and 142 journal articles.

      Methodological Approach

      Forty years after the publication of the first articles indexed in Web of Science related to disinformation, it seems timely to construct an x-ray of its presence in academic research in order to objectively set out the scope achieved. To this end a mixed methodology is applied, which combines bibliographical with bibliometric analysis to gather qualitative and quantitative data, enabling the volume and impact of scientific publications to be measured.

      This chapter therefore aims to analyze the scientific production on disinformation issues published in journals indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS) without any temporal restriction, that is, from 1900 until August 2020. The sample was put together on the basis of articles housed in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) database, which is the most relevant and pertinent index for the area of Communication. Following the analysis of the conceptual articles related to disinformation (Wardle 2017, 2018; Tandoc et al. 2018), a list of terms used for the consultation was designed. The following search string was applied:

      (disinformation* OR misinformation* OR “misleading information*” OR “manipulated new*” OR “fake new*” OR “fact* check*” OR “false content*” OR “false new*” OR “post-truth” OR “verification tool*” OR “verif* process*” OR “information* disorder*” OR “hybrid media system”).

      This search was conducted on the titles, abstracts, and keywords of the articles published by all SSCI publications, without considering book reviews or proceedings. Initially, 536 references were localized in the general category of Social Sciences, and this list was subjected to a bibliometric analysis referring to the following indicators: temporal evolution, authorship, affiliation, language, country of production, journal, and most-cited articles.

A codifier examined all the articles in full, eliminated reiterations, and for the content analysis selected only those empirical investigations whose pivotal issue was disinformation, obtaining a final sample of 434 articles. In addition, a deductive codebook was implemented, and labels created manually on Zotero were applied in order to classify and categorize the information. In this second phase the registered variables belonged to the following categories: (i) theme; (ii) subtheme; (iii) platform analyzed; (iv) methodological focus; and (v) tools employed. The thematic classification used a standard taxonomy proposed by the International Communication Association (ICA), which establishes 24 sections within the Communication area.

      The following pages present a chronological evolution of the interest that disinformation has aroused in the academic sphere, which journals have provided more extensive coverage, the