Scare to destabilise: disinformation about COVID-19 in Argentina and Spain

Abstract

Disinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic has reached such a magnitude that the situation has been described as infodemic. The aim of this research is to analyze the intentions of such disinformation on social networks and its relationship with the sources, topics, main actors, and emotional appeals of the hoaxes. To this end, we conducted a content analysis on the 548 pandemic-related disinformation published between 1 January 2020 and 30 June 2021 by the fact-checking media platforms Chequeado, in Argentina, and Newtral, in Spain. The results show that disinformation about COVID-19 has similar characteristics in both countries, except in sources' case, which is consistent with the transnational nature of the infodemic. The hoaxes seek, above all, to destabilise; negationism is the most frequent issue; the most common protagonists are health institutions and professionals, and negative emotional appeals prevail, especially anger, used with polarizing objectives, and fear, whose incorporation pursues destabilising and chaos-fuelling purposes. The appeal to positive emotions is reserved, for fake content with reputational or informative objectives. Furthermore, a statistical correlation is observed between the inferred intention of disinformation and the rest of the variables. The findings of this study lead to the conclusion that the infodemic had the same transnational character as the pandemic, which would suggest that disinformation on a global agenda item uses shared parameters for its propagation in different scenarios.