According to data from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, prior to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, verified or blue badged accounts belonged to people like journalists, celebrities, and of course members of the government. However, after the acquisition, this changed radically, since currently a person can acquire verification by paying US$8 a month, this badge not only generates a status, but also allows the Twitter algorithm to boost their publications to make them more visible within it.
This transformation of the platform causes disinformation to increase in payment accounts that are verified. In Latin America, various countries such as Peru, Chile and Colombia currently have projects and laws that seek to regulate disinformation, especially that information that deals with political issues at electoral times, since it can generate confusion, alerts, or erroneous thoughts in the population regarding various topics.
Marcos Antón, Consultant, PhD in Communication and professor and researcher at the ValenciaInternational University (VIU), indicates that this type of fake news occurs all over the world and it is almost impossible for this type of communication not to leak. “It should be noted that in some Latin American countries the private or public generalist media have a very weak market position compared to the new media. For this reason, the consumption of alternative media is more frequent and direct by the population, in which there are sometimes fewer journalistic filters in the treatment and verification of fake news. There are also some LATAM countries that are traditionally more tolerant of sensationalist or biased headlines in their media, which can make it difficult for readers to detect fake news”.
Next, the VIU expert provides 5 recommendations that work as a checklist to be able as users to analyze the information that we are receiving through the different channels and social networks, which today are quite a few:
1. Does the headline scare or annoy you? It is likely that, if it provokes that reaction in the reader, there is a misinformative intention behind it.
2. Have you read the news? Many times we share news only because of its headline, because we do not stop to read it. Before sharing or taking a tendentious headline as true, you have to read it, because many times the body of the news ends up denying the headline or, directly, we do not find those statements or news event in the text, or we even verify that it has been taken out of context.
3. Are there other media that have published this news? Sometimes it is enough to do a simple search on the news event in Internet search engines to discover that it is a lie and that other media deny it. Here the means of verification or fact-checking play a fundamental role.
4. Do you know the author of the news? Reputable and professional media and journalists are not as permeable to fake news, so a good tactic is to check authorship. Lots of fake news appear in not very reputable media and are signed by false names, or at least no author is directly mentioned.
5. Does it include sources? An essential premise of journalism is that the journalist must base his statements on sources if he is not a direct witness to the event. Therefore, the sources have to be mentioned and, many times, they are either not mentioned or we can directly verify that these sources do not exist.
Keeping this list in mind will be essential so as not to replicate misinformation on any social media, or through word of mouth. Nowadays, due to the influx and speed with which information travels through social media, it is necessary for it to go through a verification process.
Massimo Desiato, an Italian-Venezuelan philosopher, mentioned in a document that there is a desire to ignore information when it does not fit with our way of thinking. Disinformation precisely takes advantage of this, since it uses arguments and extols passionate debates that are very permeable to many lines of thought, it is then when criteria and objectivity become essential to navigate news communications with greater awareness.
