Online disinformation on Facebook: the spread of fake news during the Portuguese 2019 election

Elections worldwide have been marked by the spread of fake news. Online disinformation is everywhere, used as a political weapon in the battlefield of manipulation. This study focused on the Portuguese 2019 elections to assess the reach of fake news compared to mainstream media news and to verify wh...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of contemporary European studies Vol. 30; no. 2; pp. 297 - 312
Main Authors Baptista, João Pedro, Gradim, Anabela
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Abingdon Routledge 03.04.2022
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects
Corruption
Counting
Elections
Electronic publishing
engagement
Extremism
Facebook
Fake news
False information
Immigration
Immigration policy
Internet
Left wing politics
Manipulation
News
Partisanship
Political campaigns
Popularity
Social media
Social networks
Socialist parties
Software
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Summary:Elections worldwide have been marked by the spread of fake news. Online disinformation is everywhere, used as a political weapon in the battlefield of manipulation. This study focused on the Portuguese 2019 elections to assess the reach of fake news compared to mainstream media news and to verify whether fake news had specific targets. We reviewed all posts (N=1197) from newspaper Facebook pages and fake news Facebook pages published during the campaign to verify their engagement. BuzzSumo assessed popularity by counting all posts' shares, reactions and comments. Iramuteq software related the content of all published headlines by analyzing clusters of the most frequent words. Findings show that fake news had no greater reach than real news during the election campaign. However, fake news are more likely to be shared, while real news tend to get more reactions and more comments. In fake news headlines the terms associated with left-wing and government are the most common. The prime minister and the Socialist Party are associated with negative connotations. Results suggest that Portuguese fake news are related to rightwing extremism and publish hate content targeting corruption and leftist policies in general. Unlike other countries, anti-immigration discourse and fearmongering were not prominent contents.
ISSN:1478-2804
1478-2790
DOI:10.1080/14782804.2020.1843415