The problems of disinformation in today's media ecosystem

Fake news, false news, hoaxes, or information disorders, asWardle (2019) calls it, represent an increasingly notable problem on a global scale. These phenomena of the circulation of false or erroneous information are not new, and the link between (mis)information, deception, conviction, strategy, and power has been going on for several centuries. Some examples are highlighted byRomero-Rodríguez (2013) in classic works. In The Odyssey, Homer relates a particular military strategy that was based on deception. The famous Trojan horse, which was given as an offering to the city, but with soldiers ready to battle hidden inside it and who determined the fall of the fortified city. Later in the story, you can also find another classic text of military strategy, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, which highlights the importance of convincing one’s own troops based on deceptions, stories, or myths, to ensure their accompaniment in military operations.

In more recent history, the gadgets for conducting public speeches have also become relevant to political strategy. The Soviet Communist Party was one of the great political actors who carried out these actions of propaganda, deception, appeal to emotion, and the construction of a story that frequently had little contact with reality. This need to control the message with criteria that benefit power could also be observed in the management of the Minister of Propaganda and Information of the Nazi regime (between 1933-1945), Joseph Goebbels. The recognition of the importance of the manipulation of public opinion is reflected in the "principles" left by this infamous character in world history. His strategy was based on absolute control of the media, control of all kinds of information related to the regime, and, of course, censorship (Dobb, 1950).

These processes of domination and manipulation that favor power through tricks were denounced for decades by sectors linked to Marxism, such as the referents of the Frankfurt School. Marcuse points out that power uses techniques of deception and confusion to generate greater sympathy in the population and, thus, maintain its privileged position, without dissent, thanks to the control of the media (Marcuse, 1964). The author carries out a deep analysis of the role of the media in this process of construction of a story that ends up alienating audiences, leaving them defenseless before power.

For these analysts of social events before the emergence and consolidation of the Internet, the role of the mass media was essential to maintain the status quo of political actors. Other more current critical studies indicate that the media stand as political actors in themselves, fully aware of their ability to influence public opinion (Schiller, 1987).

Although there is much to be said regarding the approaches that relate the circulation of false messages within the public sphere, their communication, and the power relations that constitute them, it can be summarized that the theoretical approaches that deal with these informational disorders between the 19^th and the 20^th century are three: the paradigm of social massification; the paradigm of propaganda manipulation, and that of spectacular mediatization (Tornero, Tayie, Tejedor, & Pulido, 2018).

At the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century, the processes of massification occurred in modern societies, which can be described as pre-democratic and pre-media scenarios: "Media development is incipient and depends on mechanical systems, such as printing and paper, that is, they do not have means of communication based on electricity" (Pérez Tornero et al, 2018, pp. 216-217). At this historical moment are the studies on the soul of the masses, the subordination of individuality to the logic of the mass, which causes the loss of individuality and submission to the mental unity of the latter. The capacity for suggestion and the appeal to instinct surpass the individual and reason (Bon & G, 1947). Or those of Freud (2013), who seek the psychological explanation of the psychic modification that the influence of the mass imposes on the individual. He points out that in the essence of the collective soul, there are also loving relationships that give cohesion to the mass, so that the individual encompassed in the mass abandons what is personal and allows himself to be suggested by others, and does so for feeling the need to agree with them and not in opposition to them, that is, out of love for others. This analysis period is characterized by approaches that come from psychoanalysis and sociology.

The paradigm of propaganda manipulation is situated from the beginning and until the middle of the 20^th century, characterized by the interwar period and the massification of technological advances. Studies such as the one of Lasswell (1927); Bernays (1928), or Lazarsfeld (2011) gained momentum, from where they analyzed the effects that propaganda and disinformation had on citizens in authoritarian regimes, as well as during electoral campaigns of democratic systems. In this period,Bryant (1953) focuses on propaganda and highlights the deceptive features that constitute it to persuade the public, he defines it as: “Any partially or deceptively used rhetoric, at the service of 'anti-reason' or 'pseudo-reason' techniques, such as suggestion, reiteration, imaginative substitution, verbal irrelevance, emotional and pseudo-logical harassment, exclusion of competing ideas, and the short-circuit or by-pass of informed judgment” (Bryant, 1953, p. 417).

The third paradigm is that of spectacular mediatization. It corresponds to the end of the 20^th century where societies are already completely traversed by the logic of consumption and at the orders of capital, catapulted by an entrenched and globally accessible media system. Public discourse is marketed as one more product of the industry, and a strong connection with advertising and marketing is manifested, which causes these political discourses to be transformed according to the rules of the show (Debord, 1967). Television played a fundamental role in the development of this spectacularization process, which among other effects, weakens the line that separates the public from the private and information from entertainment (Carpini & Williams, 2011).

Beyond the particular approaches, what characterizes these paradigms is the recognition that public discourse that appeals to emotion, affectivity, and seldom to reason or even reality, has strong roots in the sociopolitical system; in turn, its survival is configured according to the ecosystem that contains it. It should be noted that unlike what these communication ecosystems proposed, the current scenario of web 2.0 and 3.0 replaces the unidirectional communication system with a bidirectional one, where socio-digital networks appear as protagonists of the changes. There, agents go from occupying a passive-receptive role to one in which they can emit and receive, produce or consume.

LucianoGalup (2019) argues that the great challenge presented by socio-digital networks is linked to the reconfiguration of the hegemonic model of mediation between politics and society, which since the 1980s and for almost thirty years had as its protagonist traditional media, in general, (radio, graphic press) and television in particular. “Those were the access windows of the factors and the political actors, not only to each one of the households but to each one of the citizens. Social media emerged to redefine that hegemony. That privilege, that power, today is misconfigured” (Galup, 2019, p. 64).

This change in roles modifies the public sphere, generating more diverse relationships between political actors, citizens, and the media. AsSuiter (2016) points out, the current media ecosystem is dominated by reality shows, social media, and the existence of filter bubbles. In this scenario, the study of disinformation is absolutely necessary, because it represents a problem that impacts the base of democratic systems and the political actions of citizens.

From the different theoretical approaches that have addressed the subject in recent years, the diversity of terms prevails to designate that information that is misleading, false, or erroneous and that is deliberately constituted in this way.Durandin (1995) is one of the first interested in classifying those actions that can be considered misinformative: eliminating or silencing all the information; altering information (information manipulation) and inventing events. For the author, these phenomena are basically organized sets of deceptions. Others, however, consider that information survives in any misinformation. In other words, any vague, misleading, or ambiguous content can be informative (Karlova & Lee, 2011). Disinformation has a causal relationship with the journalistic treatment of information when there is a manifest breach of the ethical standards of the profession (Murolo, 2019). AsGelfert (2018) indicates, fake news is the deliberate presentation of false or misleading claims as news, where journalism fails to verify before publication and dissemination.

Hazard-Owen (2017) considers that what characterizes the success of false news is that it is directed at emotions, has the appearance of legitimacy, has an effective publication on the Internet, and is amplified on the Internet (such as Twitter or Facebook).

Although it is a phenomenon against which journalism has been fighting for decades (Burnam, 1975; Galdón, 1994), the spread of false news, or information disorders, took on a new dimension with the consolidation of social networks. This causes the problem of fake news to rise to a transnational scale. The breadth and speed in the dissemination of this (mis)information, forced governments, third sector entities, and international organizations to take care of establishing parameters for the detection of deliberately false content, to reduce its dissemination. The digital society fosters a gathering place with almost no state regulation³, but with a strong presence of private intervention⁴, where the anonymity and opacity of the sources that generate the information constitute the ideal territory for the dissemination and viralization of all types of content.

One of the most popular ways to name these contents is to consider them fake news, following the expression popularized byQuandt, Frischlich, Boberg, and Schatto-Eckrodt (2019) after the US presidential elections in 2016 that faced Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the first being the winner. To this way of calling this phenomenon of disinformation, others are added, such as “information disorder”, considered this way in reports made by organizations such as the European Commission or even Unesco (Ireton and Possetii, 2018).

Calvo and Aruguete (2020) suggest addressing these disinformation phenomena according to their intentionality and distinguish false news from fake news. False news would be news that misinforms without the intention of misinforming, that is, it is the product of confusion or error. Unlike this, fake news is created to provoke and, mainly, destabilize the political system. It is there where the three most important elements of political communication meet: politicians, the media, and public opinion. If public opinion consumes false information given by the media or platforms about political actors, the system becomes corrupted (Pujalte, 2020).

Beyond the polysemy and the methodological problems caused by its lack of consensus in the denomination and how to frame the phenomenon (Alemanno, 2018), this study subscribes to consider these information disorders with the definition of hoax, understood as “all content intentionally false and with a truthful appearance, conceived to deceive citizens and publicly disseminated by any platform or media” (Salaverría et al., 2020, p. 4).

For López-Borrull et al. (2018), the best way to combat this problem in the digital society is to seek greater access to information and the possibility of content verification. The platforms made different fact-checking tools available to users during the coronavirus crisis. To mention a few cases: Google reverse, allows you to verify the approximate origin of the images that circulate on the network. With the same ease that you can search for information on the site, you can upload an image and confirm the date and place where it could have been taken. The system works through ClaimReview, a fact-checker external to the company. The Twitter platform established a notice that shows followers if the content is retweeted without having previously entered the link, as well as an alert that highlights if the information that is part of the tweet is erroneous or questionable. It also hardened its tracking of fake accounts.

Along the same lines, Facebook sought to clean up its image after the Cambridge Analytica and data traffic during the 2016 US elections scandal and established a system to prevent the viralization of fake news through its fact-checking program that is managed by third parties outside Facebook, to combat hoaxes that circulate within its platform. Furthermore, it generated a warning to users when they established interaction with false content, thanks to the development of algorithmic technology in charge of detecting false or misleading information. In turn, the WhatsApp messaging platform determined a limit to the number of messages that could be forwarded, to lower the levels of content viralization.

Fact-checking platforms

There is a notable effort from different entities to be able to fight the informative hoaxes that are propagated by the media and socio-digital networks. Some examples can be mentioned: the European Union has a surveillance action to combat fake news items that occur within its territory; the UN has an initiative called Verified that also seeks citizen collaboration to report false information; news agencies already have a specific information verification area, and since September 2015, the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) has been created, a unit of the Poynter Institute dedicated to bringing together fact-checkers around the world. Currently, there are seventy-four organizations that are part of this network, coming from seventy countries and carrying out checks in forty languages. Its function is to verify statements of public figures, important institutions, and other wide-circulation statements of interest to society. Ufarte-Ruiz et al. (2020, p. 24) define fact-checking as “a journalistic practice based on the subsequent verification of information published by the media and on the verification of the statements or comments made by political leaders or relevant figures”.

Fact-checking is essential in the current digital context, where problems of spreading false information are frequent, as mentioned in the previous section. Citizens need tools at their fingertips that allow them to quickly identify when they are exposed to false news and also be able to have enough elements to distinguish this type of misinformation from the true news.

Fact-checking is enhanced by the tools offered by technology, which allows access to data in a more accelerated way, which has an impact on the public accessing better quality information. Among the tools most used by fact-checkers is Google image reverse, which, as mentioned, serves to know the approximate origin of an image that circulates on the Internet. The Bing search tool and the TinEye app are also used to search for information on images.

To find out in which social network there is a greater interaction of suspected false content, Buzzsumo is used, which allows evaluating the most popular content. CrowdTangle is another frequently used tool, but its limitation is that it only allows viewing content on Facebook, since it corresponds to this platform. It offers data such as the average interaction of a publication, compared to that of other publications of the same user. Another free tool is TweetDeck, which corresponds to Twitter, and it also allows filtering data about publications that are shared through this platform. Those mentioned are just some of the tools that are used for fact-checking, and what is interesting is that many of them are accessible to the general public. It is also clear that these false content search and control initiatives take place on these channels because it is where many of the content that fact-checkers must deal with daily currently emerge.

The number of fact-checking platforms is increasing at an accelerated rate. The Reuters Institute highlighted this sustained growth in a study carried out during 2016, which referred to the success that they were having around the world (Graves & Cherubini, 2016). Duke University offers an annual report on these platforms and the data indicates that there are already more than 300 initiatives around the world, with new proposals appearing year after year. South America stands as the region where more fact-checking platforms have been inaugurated in the last year (Duke University, 2020).

Faced with the health crisis and the proliferation of misinformation, a network of fact-checkers in Latin America that collaborates with the IFCN, decided to carry out a project “to check information, collect and update verifications in Spanish about the coronavirus, besides producing a database with information about the measures taken by the governments of the region” (Estarque, 2020). The network called LatamChequea brings together twenty-eight entities that are dedicated to fact-checking based in sixteen Latin American countries and Spain. Its objective is "to help journalists and verifiers in the coverage of the coronavirus so that they can find reliable information more quickly and easily."

The network is coordinated by Chequeado from Argentina and the following fact-checkers participate: AFP Factual, Salud con Lupa, Aos Fatos, Estadao Verifica, and Lupa from Brazil; Bolivia Verifica; Mala Espina Check from Chile; La Silla Vacía and ColombiaCheck from Colombia; #NoComaCuento (La Nación) and La Voz de Guanacaste from Costa Rica; Periodismo de Barrio and El Toque from Cuba; Ecuador Chequea and GK from Ecuador; EFE Verifica, Maldita, and Newtral from Spain; Agencia Ocote from Guatemala; Animal Político, Spondeo Media, and Verificado from Mexico; Despacho 505 and La Lupa from Nicaragua; El Surtidor from Paraguay; Convoca, OjoPúblico, and Verificador (La República) from Peru; Observador and Polígrafo from Portugal; PoletikaRD from the Dominican Republic; UyCheck from Uruguay, and Cotejo.info, Efecto Cocuyo, and EsPaja from Venezuela. Besides offering a database with verifications and checks, they share another document with the measures taken in each country to counteract the coronavirus health crisis in the region.

It is clear that both the journalistic profile that focuses on data and verification, constitutes a space of permanent change and adaptation to combat false news (Graves, Brendan, & Reifler, 2015). The best response to the phenomenon of disinformation is not censorship, but fact-checking (Rodríguez, 2020).