Mentiras, prejuicios y rechazo. El uso de la desinformación para propagar discursos de odio contra personas migrantes y refugiadas en redes sociales: un estudio articulado del caso español

Abstract

Mentiras, prejuicios y rechazo. El uso de la desinformación para propagar discursos de odio contra personas migrantes y refugiadas en redes sociales: un estudio articulado del caso español Lies, Prejudice and Rejection. The Use of Disinformation to Spread Hate Speech against Migrants and Refugees in Social Media: A Comprehensive Study about the Spanish Case 17 frequently cited report from Gartner Group (2017) mentioned, perhaps simplistically, that by 2022 the Western public would consume more false information than true information and that there would not be enough capacity to counteract it. The year in question has arrived and, although measurement is still impossible, it seems that reality has not met the most alarmist forecasts. The problem, however, is real and its seriousness is beyond doubt, as demonstrated, for example, during the COVID-19 pandemic.Already in February 2020, before the official declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) drew attention to the need to combat the 'infodemic', understanding as such an overabundance of information -partly true and partly not-, which made it more difficult for people to find reliable information when they needed it and which posed an additional risk to the spread of the disease (OMS, 2020). Along the same lines, the Director General of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, affirmed that "[w]e are not only fighting against an epidemic; we are fighting an infodemic. Fake news spreads faster than the virus and is just as dangerous" (Ghebreyesus, 2020).Although the WHO, the media and a large part of academia have frequently used the term 'infodemic', many studies have focused on one of its specific aspects, disinformation (Bechmann, 2020), since the hoaxes and rumors about vaccines, treatments and the spread of the virus have not been limited to a problem of communication and public trust, but have had a direct effect on health and were even responsible for deaths (Islam, Sarkar et al., 2020).