Disinformation and Its Public Impact in Spain

The final session on this first day of the Future of Journalism 2023 conference begins with Jaume Suau, whose interest is in the role of news organisations in the spread of mis- and disinformation. What is the impact of disinformation, and how might we study it? Jaume is focussing here first on foreign-sponsored disinformation, whose main objective is to diminish societal trust and increase polarisation; Howe can we assess whether these campaigns have been successful? But in addition, there are also various top actors within society who create and spread disinformation content, and their dissemination strategies and goals might be different.

Further, disinformation is participatory: it is spread not only by its originators and the mechanisms (e.g. trolls and bots) they control, but also by ordinary people who may genuinely believe the information. This also means that the dissemination of disinformation must be studied beyond any single distribution platform.

This can be understood using the concepts of reach (the spread of content), impact (its ability to be perceived as true), and disinformation narratives. The present project explores this in collaboration with fact-checkers in Spain, starting with content they identified as disinformation and clustering such content into overarching narratives (e.g. on COVID-19, vaccines, Russia’s attack on Ukraine, immigration, or Catalunyan independence). It conducted a survey to examine whether people had encountered such narratives, whether people were convinced by them, etc.

Different narratives had very different levels of reach, and such reach did not correlate strongly with their impact on those who had received them. Right-wingers were more likely to believe some narratives, but this also depended on the nature of the narratives; similarly some narratives spread more strongly via television, while others spread via social media. These results will be compared with 8 other European countries and the US, to explore to what extent the impact of ideology or political attitudes might be relevant.