What is it about?
This study analyses the role of the leading Spanish political groups in the polarisation of public opinion and the promotion of the culture of disinformation through Twitter (now Platform X). The study carries out an analysis of issues associated with tweets and retweets in Spanish of the total published (n = 33,506 messages out of a total of 49,288 messages), which are contrasted with 2,730 disinformation publications identified by the two most relevant fact-checking projects in Spain (Maldita.es and Newtral.es). Based on the applied methodology, a political-communicative context is observed on Platform X, characterised by a high level of self-promotion and polarisation, facilitated by the communication strategy of specific topics applied by the actors analysed.
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Why is it important?
Our findings show how these political actors can play an active and differentiated role in the promotion of disinformation content identified by the Maldita.es and Newtral.es data verification projects.
Perspectives
This work allows us to approximate how political groups in Spain have been advancing towards possible polarisation scenarios from digital scenarios such as Platform X. This favours a context like the one proposed by the authors and is taken into account for the elaboration of this article, where the Spanish political actors studied beyond implementing communication strategies that can favour polarisation within public opinion. The messages they published on Platform X would favour the conditions for virtualising disinformation content from this scenario. An action that this work does not allow (given its scope) to determine if it is done from an active role or interested in such purposes would warrant the development of new studies with a different scope than the one shown here.
Prof. Elias Said-Hung
Universidad Internacional de La Rioja
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Polarisation and Disinformation Content from Spanish Political Actors on Twitter/X, Communication Today, November 2023, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Saints Cyril and Methodius,
DOI: 10.34135/communicationtoday.2023.vol.14.no.2.8.
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Polarisation and Disinformation Content from Spanish Political Actors on Twitter/X
This study analyses the role of the main Spanish political groups in the polarisation of public opinion and the promotion of the culture of disinformation through Twitter (now Platform X). The study carries out an analysis of issues associated with tweets and retweets in Spanish of the total published (n = 33,506 messages out of a total of 49,288 messages), which are contrasted with 2,730 disinformation publications identified by the two most relevant fact-checking projects in Spain (Maldita.es and Newtral.es). Based on the applied methodology, a political-communicative context is observed on Platform X characterised by a high level of self-promotion and polarisation, facilitated by the communication strategy of specific topics, applied by the actors analysed. The results show how these political actors can play an active and differentiated role in the promotion of disinformation content identified by the Maldita.es and Newtral.es data verification projects. This may contribute to the polarisation of Spanish public opinion on Platform X by delegitimising the opinions of their opponents on issues of interest to the public.
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