Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of False News about COVID 19 in Colombia

Abstract

In the midst of the global fight against COVID-19, another evil is occurring: disinfodemia, a term that refers to the massive circulation of false information related to the virus, which helps to increase uncertainty and the number of infected or dead people. In the world, more than 6,000 pieces of information have been disproved, 9 % in Colombia, thanks to the journalistic teams of Colombia Check, La Silla Vacía, Maldita.es and AFP. The purpose of this work is to identify and study, through content analysis, 549 disinformation or inaccurate information that circulated in the country in relation to the pandemic, during the year 2020. A count was made of the false information, as well as of the categories established by the checking media, in order to determine their degree of falsehood, Media and channels through which they circulated, authorship, formats and types of misinformation, among others. The analysis reveals that social networks are 87,4 % of the spaces where false information circulates the most; however, the media and some public figures also contribute to a lower percentage of the problem, with 17 %. The vaccine we propose focuses on the education of future journalists so that they can exercise the necessary verification of the growing amount of information that invades society, and that citizens recognize the veracity of the sources of the information to which they have access. These are ways to combat disinfodemia, which can be as lethal as the virus itself.