The Role of Minority Political Groups in the Dissemination of Disinformation. The Case of Spain

ABSTRACT

This study seeks to understand better the role played by minority political groups in Spain in promoting disinformation on Twitter. The study applies statistical analysis and topic modelling to posts (tweets and retweets) published in Spanish on Twitter (n = 20,481 tweets) and to content identified as disinformation (n = 2,730) by two independent fact-checking projects in Spain from August 2019 to March 2020. The data reveal that the political communication strategy focuses primarily on the confrontation between the majority of political groups at the national level and on legitimizing the political projects of these groups to their potential voters through specific issues. The data also reveal a co-occurrence between messages published by political actors and content identified as disinformation by fact-checkers, which depends on the tweets’ political profile, virality, and sentimental load. For this reason, the digital presence of these actors creates favourable conditions for the viral dissemination of disinformation, mainly when their content focuses on mobilizing potential voters through emotional messages. It could be helpful for fact-checkers to identify and understand the role of these actors in promoting this content.

KEYWORDS:

• Disinformation content
• digital communication
• fact-checking
• social media
• political actors
• sentiment content

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the company ESPOSSIBLE in the processing of the analysed data.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Figshare at https://figshare.com/account/home#/projects/114516.

Notes

1 https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RSelenium/index.html.

2 https://rvest.tidyverse.org/.

3 https://numpy.org/.

4 The levels are established as follows: very low (between 0 and 20 crossings), low (between 21 and 38 crossings), medium (between 39 and 69 crossings), high (between 70 and 108 crossings), and very high (109 or more crossings).

5 Educational proposal that aims to grant parents or legal guardians the authority to restrict their child's participation in non-curricular school activities.

Additional information

Funding

This work is the result of research project No. B0036-1920 funded by Universidad Internacional de la Rioja in 2019.