Detalle Publicación

CAPÍTULO DE LIBRO

Disinformation and news consumption in a polarized society: an analysis of the case of Venezuela

Libro: The politics of technology in Latin America: digital media, daily life and public engagement
Autores: Serrano Puche, Javier; Fernandez, Carmen Beatriz; Rodríguez Virgili, Jordi
Lugar de Edición: New York
Editorial: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
Fecha de publicación: 2020
Página Inicial - Final: 161 - 178
ISBN: 9780367360115
Resumen: Up until a few years ago, disinformation used to be synonymous with ¿lack of information,¿ ascribable to citizens¿ low interest in public affairs. However, since 2016 and especially as a result of the US electoral campaign (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017) and Brexit (Bastos & Mercea, 2019), disinformation also becomes a spoken about factor, above all referring to the deliberate efforts of certain agents to misinform with lies and half-truths, intoxicating and even saturating the citizen, in what have been called ¿disinformation operations.¿ Much of the success of these false news lies in their virality, that is, in their ability to be shared by Internet users throughout different social networks and instant messaging applications. From a broader perspective, disinformation is a modality within what has been called ¿problematic information¿(Jack, 2017), which includes various types of information that are inaccurate, misleading, improperly attributed, or totally fabricated. Although it is true that these contents are not novel¿-their existence goes back to the origins of modern journalism with the yellow press (Campbell, 2001) and to the use of propaganda in the World Wars (Lasswell, 1927), the existing communicational characteristics in the digital age do promote new ways for problematic information to be created, circulated, and received by users, increasing its potential effects (Freelon & Wells, 2020). In the words of Boczkowski (2017):¿fake news [have] been around for as long as real news. But a differentiating element of the contemporary moment is the existence of an information infrastructure with a scale, scope, and horizontality in information flows unprecedented in ¿