Disinformation as a professional challenge of journalism and doumentation

Abstract

Las fake news no son algo nuevo, pero sí es nueva su dimensión actual, especialmente ante acontecimientos de la trascendencia de una pandemia mundial o de una guerra, como la iniciada por Putin en Ucrania en 2022. Estas realidades y su dimensión informativa refuerzan la idea de que la difusión de contenidos engañosos, cuando no directamente falsos, es una constante a lo largo de la historia, tanto en la esfera pública y social como particularmente en el espacio de los medios de comunicación, que necesitan nuevas pautas profesionales para verificar hechos y contenidos.

Disinformation and Fact-Checking in the Face of Natural Disasters: A Case Study on Turkey–Syria Earthquakes

“…However, information saturation and the nature of social networks lead to disinformation, supported by the use of bots that develop information bubbles [57]. The deep knowledge of audiences by social networks allows the design of tailored disinformation content, which enhances its impact and propagation and contributes to the creation of an intoxicated information ecosystem [6] (p. 9).…”

“…This is the "open verification", or public, collaborative, and real-time corroboration process, which emerged in 2011 during the Arab Spring. It was not without controversy that a journalist shared unverified information in a public forum to contrast it with social network users because of the risk of the data going viral or being manipulated before being verified [6] (p. 8). In any case, correcting misinformation through fact-checking is not always safe and sometimes causes the opposite effect by contributing to amplifying misinformation and enhancing lies [80].…”

“…Staged content (original content that has been created or shared with the intent to mislead, etc.). The dramatic or irritating factor in an image or news item is directly proportional to the risk of it being a hoax [6] (p. 8).…”

“…in the contexts of crises, disasters and emergencies, regardless of the nature of their cause" [5]. Given the complexity of the information scenario where the underlying intentions of messages are not clear, it is possible to refer in general to disinformation, although several types of information disorders can be distinguished [6] (p. 9.…”