Journalistic Fact-Checking of Information in Pandemic: Stakeholders, Hoaxes, and Strategies to Fight Disinformation during the COVID-19 Crisis in Spain

Abstract

The public health crisis created by COVID-19 represents a challenge for journalists and the media. Specialised information in healthcare and science has turned into a need to deal with the current situation as well as the demand for information by society. In this context of increased uncertainty, the circulation of fake news on social networks and messaging applications has proliferated, producing what has been known as ‘infodemic’. This paper is focused on the fact-checking of journalistic content using a combined methodology: content analysis of information denied by the main Spanish fact-checking platforms (Maldita and Newtral) and an in-depth questionnaire to these stakeholders. The results confirm the quantitative and qualitative evolution of disinformation. Quantitatively, more fact-checking is performed during the state of alarm. Qualitatively, hoaxes increase in complexity as the pandemic evolves, in such a way that disinformation engineering takes place, and it is expected to continue until the development of a vaccine.

Spanish Fact-Checking Services: An Approach to Their Business Models

“…There has been a higher amount of academic literature about fact-checking in the past five years, encouraged by the expansion of these services. This issue has been treated from different perspectives: mainly, how the media and information agencies have incorporated verification techniques [8,[26][27][28][29], the commitment of verification to journalistic quality, and the fight against disinformation [11,30], the analysis of the verification of fake news in the field of politics [5,31,32], and the combating of COVID-19 fake news through factchecking [33][34][35][36][37]. In the case of Spain, studies have mainly focused on the analysis of the work procedures followed by the verification platforms associated with the communication or independent media that have emerged in recent years [13,[38][39][40].…”

Búsqueda, escaneo y evitación de información sobre COVID-19 en Chile

“…Futuros estudios podrían ir más allá de la descripción y abordar cómo estas conductas informativas inciden en la práctica de comportamientos preventivos. Asimismo, y considerando el contexto de infodemia que ha marcado la crisis del coronavirus (Aleixandre-Benavent et al, 2020), futuros estudios podrían profundizar en otras conductas informativas, como las prácticas de chequeo de información tan necesarias en situaciones en las que abundan las noticias falsas, en especial en los espacios digitales (López-García et al, 2021;Salaverría et al, 2020).…”

Gatekeepers as Safekeepers—Mapping Audiences’ Attitudes towards News Media’s Editorial Oversight Functions during the COVID-19 Crisis

“…Knowledge brokers are influential because they perform crucial knowledge functions such as aggregating and translating information into accessible forms and building actors' capacity to mobilize knowledge into action (Yanovitzky and Weber 2019). In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, health journalism, and science journalism have emerged as particularly valuable types of journalism for educating the public (López-García et al 2021;Zhao et al 2020) to avoid panic and fear and to influence health literacy (Tejedor et al 2020). However, given the complexity of the coronavirus crisis and its implications for so many aspects of human life, not only science and health journalists but reporters from any beat could serve a vital function by relaying information to the public in an understandable and clear manner.…”