The ecosystem of disinformation

Since the times when the first publications were recorded, citizens have had to face up to two great obstacles when accessing knowledge. The first is the overload of information, which often ends up causing confusion and anxiety, qualified by some using such eloquent terms as “infoxication” or “infobesity”. This is nothing new: we know that back in the 16th and 17th centuries, after the invention of the printing press, many people complained of the excessive abundance of books.

The second challenge is the difficulty of knowing whether the information available to us is really reliable. As explained by the researcher Joanathan Hernández Pérez, from the National Autonomous University of México, in his interesting essay The ecosystem of disinformation: excesses and falsehoods, fake news “have been with us for centuries, as have the attempts to pursue them, spread them, prevent them and control them.”

An ally of knowledge, but also of fake news

The new technological tools have multiplied incalculably these abovementioned trends. To give a relevant example, today we know that the political propaganda of the 21st century, through social media, can have a decisive effect on political and electoral processes - even putting the quality of our democracies at risk.

The “infodiversity” characteristic of the Internet era makes it easier to spread and expand any message, which often causes greater social transparency, but also encourages the creation of ecosystems that seek to generate instability or confusion, provoking public opinions or marking out trends in line with the interests of their creators. Added to this complex scenario is the recent generalisation of artificial intelligence (AI), which gives very fast answers to our queries, without specifying in many cases, the sources used or informing us of the bias of the programmers. 

The answer to these dilemmas

As indicated by Luis M. Romero-Rodríguez, a professor and researcher at the King Juan Carlos University of Madrid, in an interview published in the Communication and Education Bureau of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, “fake news go beyond the false messages that are being launched on social media or by certain opinion leaders and that go viral.” Rather they involve information belonging to “a propagandistic machinery or from laboratories,” which are copied “by the friendly media without checking their truthfulness. In fact, in this post-truth system, truth is the least important item.” The essential point is “that the message gets out there, that it becomes a hit and that it generates a lot of traffic.”

When faced with this situation, we shouldn’t start scaremongering. More often than not, it is essential for us to develop critical thinking in order to be able to calibrate the reliability of the information that we consume. Internet is only a means; we decide whether it should be used to increase our knowledge or to contribute to reaffirming ourselves in an unfounded subjectivity.

Citizens faced with disinformation

The first study on disinformation in Spain, prepared in 2022 by the University of Navarra and the Unión de Televisiones Comerciales en Abierto (UTECA), in which 1,224 people over the age of 18 years from our country were interviewed, showed a series of interesting conclusions that we have summarised below:

• El 95,8% of Spaniards believe that disinformation is a problem of today’s society.
• Un 91% affirm that disinformation is a danger to democracy.
• El 88,1% give their views that people tend to believe more in the messages they receive if they coincide with their way of thinking.
• However, only 32,8% admit that, in their specific case, they tend to believe more about the information that coincides with their way of thinking.
• Those surveyed are convinced that 42,1% of the messages and information that they receive are false.
• Young people think that older people are more prone to being deceived.Older people think the exact opposite.