Fact-checking Public Claims in Romania. A Case Study on Factual.ro

Abstract

This paper addresses the errors of the Romanian public communication in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic (March-December 2020), classified as disinformation by fact-checking website Factual.ro. The focus is on public claims made on the Facebook platform by political representatives through their personal accounts or public pages. One of the main findings is that the public statements tagged as False came from Facebook pages/accounts with a high visibility and reached the highest engagement rates, as compared to other fact-checked claims. Although this research paper covers only a small part of the public statements during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, it offers a glimpse into the strategic communication flaws, which can be a starting point in anticipating the effects of social policies.