Título del artículo
Disinformation in Facebook Ads in the 2019 Spanish General Election Campaigns
Autores/as
Lorena Cano Orón
Dafne Calvo Miguel
Guillermo López García
Tomás Baviera Puig
Resumen
As fake news elicits an emotional response from users, whose attention is then monetised, political advertising has a significant influence on its production and dissemination. Facebook ads, therefore, have an essential role in contemporary political communication, not only because of their extensive use in international political campaigns, but also because they address intriguing questions about the regulation of disinformation on social networking sites. This research employs a corpus of 14,684 Facebook ads published by the major national political parties during their campaigns leading up to the two Spanish general elections held in 2019. A manual content analysis was performed on all the visually identical ads so as to identify those containing disinformation and those denouncing it. The topics addressed in these ads were then examined. The results show that the political parties’ Facebook ad strategies were akin to those of conventional advertising. Disinformation messages were infrequent and mainly posted by Ciudadanos and VOX. Nonetheless, it is striking that the main topic addressed in the ads was the unity of Spain – precisely the issue of Catalonia’s independence. In light of this, it can be deduced that ‘traditional’ parties are taking longer to renounce classical forms of campaigning than their ‘new’ counterparts, thus demonstrating that the actors implementing disinformation strategies are not only restricted to the extreme right of the ideological spectrum.
Palabras clave
campaigns; disinformation; elections; Facebook; fake news; political communication; political parties; Spain
Publicación
Revista Media & Communication
Volumen
29
Número
1
Año
2021
Páginas
217- 228
Enlace de acceso al contenido
https://mediaflows.es/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Disinformation-in-Facebook-Ads-in-the-2019-Spanish-General-Election-Campaigns.pdf
REFERENCIA COMPLETA
Lorena Cano-Orón, Dafne Calvo, López-García, Guillermo y Tomás Baviera (2021). «Disinformation in Facebook Ads in the 2019 Spanish General Election Campaigns». Revista Media & Communication, Vol. 9, No 1, pp. 217- 228. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17645/mac.v9i1.3335
