‘Fake News’ vs. ‘Post-Truth’ in Spain

The final presentation in this IAMCR 2019 session is by Luisa Martinez-Garcia, about a ‘fake news’ event in Spain that involved a widely shared news story claiming that a local town attempted to stop the time. This is an example of a post-truth event, Luisa suggests.

Post-truth stories make false equivalences, referencing Web content and building on emotional argument. They deny empirical evidence and instead connect to readers’ commonsense understandings of the world. Importantly, the concept of post-truth is related, but not identical to ‘fake news’, and the latter is currently used significantly more widely, in spite of its contested definition.

The present project examined the discussion of the post-truth concept on the Spanish Twittersphere, focussing on some 1,000 tweets from the #postverdad hashtag. The hashtag has evolved over time, and there is the usual long-tail distribution in participation; given the specialised topic, it is driven especially by Spanish scholars. It is also influenced by current news events in Spain and elsewhere, of course.