La infodemia y viralización de información falsa en tiempos de COVID. Estudio de caso: “El Mercioco” y “El Burrercio”

Abstract

At the beginning of 2020, people began to talk about the new coronavirus pandemic, a disease that was already beginning in Asian countries, from that moment misinformation began to populate the world. Some time later it came to Latin America, and the different information multiplied. Since the state of emergency decree, false news and misinformation have increased exponentially and this fact is manifested in the publications of digital media. In this work, a content analysis related to the Covid -19 pandemic was presented, within the Facebook pages “El Mercioco” and “El Burrercio”. Identified as satirical pages that reproduce infodemics, the investigation is established in the periods: March - April 2020 and in a second moment from July - August, considered temporalities in which the Covid exponentially affected our country.

From a qualitative approach, the content analysis was carried out, in order to identify the false news that have been disseminated during these periods and study each of their components by having an apparent notion of veracity that induces users to open the links of these supposed news. The article explores the construction format of the structure of memes. With this investigation, it was possible to analyze the content posted on the “El Mercioco” and “El Burrercio” fan pages, around the Covid and determine how they led to the formation of infodemics.