IBERIFIER Report “Analysis of the impact of disinformation on political, economic, social and security issues, governance models and good practices: the cases of Spain and Portugal’’

Executive summary

This report is the result of a comparative study on the analysis of the impact of disinformation on political, economic, social and security issues, governance models and good practices in the cases of Spain and Portugal. The analysis is one of the strategic objectives of the IBERIFIER project (Iberian Media Research & Fact-Checking) [1].

The study has identified the following five main challenges:

1. Frame and articulate the scenarios of disinformation, its socio-political repercussions and the institutional reactions set to face them in the two Iberian countries, in the framework of the policies, values and interests aligned by the European Commission.
2. Point out the specificities of the media markets, information systems, new journalistic practices and new habits of news consumption in both countries.
3. Highlight the digitalisation and platformisation processes in Spain and Portugal, pointing out the changes reflected in the dynamics of production and access to news.
4. Put into perspective the emerging phenomenon of polarisation in the political discourse, its relations with the computational logics that feed the distribution of news in the various online contexts and its repercussions on the media agenda.
5. Diagnose the conditions of financial sustainability of the media and social communication systems in the contexts under analysis, in addition to the levels of trust in the traditional media and in networked information.

We analyse some case studies on disinformation in the two countries (in electoral contexts, during the pandemic, during the war in Ukraine) that are emblematic of the media and political challenges that must be faced in order to help public opinion defend itself from disinformation campaigns.

Finally, we highlight in a comparative manner the common and divergent aspects between the two Iberian realities. In this respect, the difference in the relationship of trust the two countries have towards their national media stands out, with a high degree of mistrust in the Spanish case and a greater trust in the Portuguese.

See also: Informe IBERIFIER “El impacto estratégico de la desinformación en España”.

[1] This project has received funding from the European Commission under the call CEF-TC-2020-2 (European Digital Media Observatory) with reference 2020-EU-IA-0252.