Abstract:
Since the North American presidential election of 2016, the role of social media on the propagation of misleading news and its instrumentalization by partisan groups has raised
concerns. In this article we analyse the contents of 47 Facebook pages and 39 Facebook groups prior to the Portuguese parliamentary election of 6th of October of 2019 to track disinformation. Groups and pages to monitor were selected through a process that combined the number of fans or members, the proportion of political content, and the number of posts per week. We concluded that disinformative content was prevalent in the pages and groups monitored, that several political actors had a relevant influence on the debate and that most disinformation stemmed from the spinning of both mainstream and non-mainstream news to serve a political purpose.
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Gustavo Cardoso is an associate researcher at CIES-Iscte Professor of Technology and Society and head of the PhD program at Iscte. He also works with the Department of Communications and Performance Studies of the University of Milan and with the Portuguese Catholic University. His international cooperation in European research networks brought him to work with IN3 (Internet Interdisciplinary Institute) in Barcelona, WIP (World Internet Project) at USC Annenberg, COST A20 "The Impact of the Internet in Mass Media" and COST 298 "Broadband Society". He is co-editor, with Manuel Castells, of the book Network Society: from Knowledge to Policy and Associate Editor at the peer-reviewed journals IJOC at USC Annenberg and IC&S at Routledge. He is a member of the evaluation panels of the European Research Council (ERC) and of the ESF (European Science Foundation).
José Moreno is a Research Assistant at CIES-Iscte. He is currently enrolled in a PhD program an Iscte studying online platforms and interaction with mainstream media. He
completed his master’s degree also at Iscte with the thesis “The social and economic value of information in the network society”. José Moreno is a former journalist with more than 20 years of experience in printed media.
Inês Narciso is a Research Assistant at CIES-Iscte. She is currently enrolled in a PhD at Iscte studying Moral Panics, Fear of Crime, Offender Based Research and Red Teaming applied to Law Enforcement. Inês has more than 12 years of experience in law enforcement, specialized in OSINT methods.
Nuno Palma is an Assistant Professor at Escola Superior de Ciências Sociais – Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa and is currently enrolled in a PhD program of Communication Studies at Iscte. He has worked as Backend Developer, becoming experienced with data extraction thought API development.
