The fake news pandemic on Facebook during the covid-19

Authors

Keywords:

Fake News, Covid-19 pandemic, Facebook

Abstract

The article analyzes the spread of fake news during the covid-19 pandemic on Facebook. The corpus consists of 53 posts published in Brazilian profiles between July and August 2020. For the identification of false messages, we use the Lupa agency's fact-checking service as a reference, which has a specific section to analyze the dissemination of this type of content. on the social media studied. The objective is to verify which subjects and characters gained more prominence during the covid-19 pandemic. For this, we use the methodology of quantitative content analysis. Based on the classification proposed by Claire Wardle, we also identified the most common types of fake news found on Facebook in the collected posts. The result showed that most of the fake news contained manufactured content, entirely fake, created to deceive and misinform users of social media. The main target of the messages were politicians and celebrities.

Author Biography

Erivelto Amarante, Universidade Federal do Paraná

Doutorando em Ciência Política pela Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR), mestre em Comunicação pela UFPR.

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Published

2020-12-18

Issue

No. 31 (2020)

Section

Artigos

License

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