Desinformación y pandemia

If reality stopped when we began to understand the importance of the pandemic, the hangover from the misinformation tsunami has allowed us to capture a panoramic view of its processes, its forms of distribution and circulation, and also its motivations and first consequences. We are living in a moment of normalization of all disinformation processes in the public sphere. We are not only witnessing a phenomenon that affects only political disinformation, but, and perhaps more importantly, hoaxes related to immigration or science. In this scenario, the extreme media coverage generated by confinement reinforced the idea that fear and misinformation are closely linked. The less reality can be seen and physically verified, the more doubts appear about the true content of events and also their consequences. This book focuses on the informational ecosystem as a window from which to try to relate and explain the others. The normalization of disinformation processes, fear as a driver of information overdoses, tiredness and fatigue as a generating mechanism of informational self-protection or polarization as a strategic tool for distorting reality are considered as the most obvious problems. The battle against misinformation is not only in stopping its viralization or making the truth more sexy, it is also in the ability to quickly generate doubts in the public that make them decide not to share unverified information. In this context, and during the first weeks of the pandemic, it was more important to stop misinformation than to provide information -partial and incomplete- on the evolution of the crisis.