Disinformation in Poland: Thematic classification based on content analysis of fake news from 2019

Abstract

The paper presents a qualitative study of fake news on Polish-language internet media that seeks to arrive at their thematic classification in order to identify areas particularly vulnerable to disinformation in Poland. Fake news examples from 2019 were selected using popular Polish fact-checking sites (N = 192) and subjected to textual analysis and coding procedure to establish the thematic categories and specific topics most often encountered in this type of disinformation, with the following thematic categories identified in the process: political and economic; social; gossip/rumour; extreme; pseudo-scientific; worldview; historical; and commercial. The study culminates in a critical interpretation of results and discussion of the phenomenon in its Polish and international contexts. Among discussed conclusions is the dominance of content related to the government, Catholic Church, and LGBT issues in the Polish context, as well as the longevity of health-based fake news, especially anti-vaccination content, that points to the global impact of fake news and calls for action to prevent its spread.

Overcome the fragmentation in online propaganda literature: the role of cultural and cognitive sociology

“…The supply-side literature on online propaganda has also provided important insights into the "treatments" and "settings" dimensions of the phenomenon, by exploring production and dissemination strategies employed by propagandists on SNPs. By mapping propaganda networks (e.g., Ferrara et al, 2016;Benkler et al, 2018;Vosoughi et al, 2018;Ahmed et al, 2020) as well as the type of messages circulating through them (e.g., Howard and Kollanyi, 2016;Rosińska, 2021), researchers have developed a detailed depiction of the online ecosystems where this kind of material proliferates, identifying diffusion patterns as well as techniques adopted for maximizing message propagation. On this latter, they have uncovered the widespread use of automation (often combined with human curation) to enhance the circulation of specific political stances, as documented in numerous studies on political bots (e.g., McKelvey and Dubois, 2017;Woolley and Howard, 2018;Ferrara, 2020).…”

Emotional content and sharing on Facebook: A theory cage match

“…Recent estimates suggest that 59.4% of the global population (and 77.8% of those aged 18 and higher) uses social media and that the average user spends roughly 2.5 hours a day on social media platforms (1). Social media platforms are increasingly a medium where people, from ordinary citizens to famous celebrities and politicians, share their opinions and their lives, learn about current events, attempt to influence each other, and spread misinformation [e.g., (2)(3)(4)]. Individuals, governments, and companies are interested in what content causes readers to share posts because of the power of social media to influence public and consumer opinion [e.g., (5,6)].…”

“…Given the importance of social media sharing to political and social discourse, behavior, and attitudes offline and in general [e.g., ( 2 , 4 , 5 , 7 )], we focused on sociopolitical individual and group Facebook accounts (entities). We sampled social media from Poland and Lithuania, two countries where sociopolitical discourse was (is) contested internally and with Russia ( 4 , 44 – 47 ). There are, therefore, security implications for social media discourse not just for those two countries, but regionally and globally.…”

Disinformation Perception by Digital and Social Audiences: Threat Awareness, Decision-Making and Trust in Media Organizations

“…In this sense, the consequences of disinformation have been analyzed in scientific research of a political nature [1][2][3][4] but also in the media [5][6][7] about the concept [8][9][10], the contents [11][12][13], the sources [14][15][16], the distribution channels [17][18][19] and the multiple strategies to fight against disinformation, among which media literacy stands out [20][21][22]. The effects of disinformation have also been discussed from the perspective of reception studies; however, there is a very small number of investigations that address in depth the problem of disinformation from the audience's viewpoint through the so-called "perception studies".…”