"Mark Antony is a womaniser, a drunkard and a mere puppet of Cleopatra". The smear campaign launched by Octavian to end Mark Antony's political career, in which he minted coins with messages against his political adversary, is one of the first examples of systematised propaganda that served, three decades before the birth of Jesus Christ, to stimulate the fourth civil war of the Republic and to raise Octavian, under the name of Augustus, as the first Roman emperor in history.
The use of propaganda and disinformation is as old as the written word.. Political and military conflict has always been accompanied by its own narrative, either to encourage the like-minded group or to demoralise the rival. As Guardian columnist Natalie Nougayrède explains, "the use of propaganda is ancient, but we have never had such effective technology to disseminate it".
In January 2020, the world's population stood at around 7.75 billion, with more than 4.5 billion internet users, 3.8 billion on social networks, and 5.19 billion devices capable of broadcasting content from anywhere on the planet.
The last two decades have seen the fracturing of traditional communication patterns with the emergence of millions of broadcasters, the disintermediation of information, the emergence of large platforms that have eroded the advertising model on which the media business was based, and the proliferation of fake content.
In this context, the largest research on misinformation ever carried out in Spain offers worrying conclusions: more than half of the population is vulnerable to this phenomenon.. The study, published this week by the Journalism Lab of the Luca de Tena Foundation with the support of Facebook, was carried out by a group of 16 interdisciplinary researchers from the San Pablo CEU and Rey Juan Carlos universities, who worked on the basis of 4,351 surveys and a qualitative analysis that lasted two months through a virtual community with a wide range of profiles.
Broadly speaking, young people - especially adolescents - and older people are more vulnerable to misinformation.. The level of income or education also has an influence: the greater the wealth or education, the less exposure. In terms of channels, a media outlet's track record or reputation stands out as a guarantee of the credibility of its information. In general, media outlets with a more moderate editorial line are given greater credibility than those that adopt a more ideological position.
In any case, the greater or lesser credibility of a piece of news "is a multivariate phenomenon in which the most relevant factor is the way in which it is discovered", according to the researchers. The study reveals that when the content of the information arrives through family members, friends or referents of the receiver, it acquires greater credibility; and it highlights the role of cognitive dissonance, highlighting the propensity to assume as valid the information aligned with the subject's beliefs.
We are moving towards a new stage of disinformation, an environment in which new ways of promoting misleading content will be consolidated.. Technology based on artificial intelligence already facilitates the manipulation of videos in which the voice, countenance or action of any character can be distorted. The problem is that it is increasingly easy to construct this type of content and there are already experts who are dedicated to commercialising it. The deep fakes will have an increasing capacity to sow or exploit chaos in alarm situations.
For this reason it is essential to deepen the search for solutions. The experts who carried out the research propose three main lines of action: guaranteeing greater transparency in the digital ecosystem, promoting greater responsibility on the part of technological actors and encouraging the promotion of media literacy in order to foster a critical spirit.
Ignacio Jiménez Soler, author of The New Disinformation: Twenty Short Essays on Manipulationadds one more: personal responsibility. "The solution lies in the personal effort to ask questions, to confront concepts, to stress the context (...) to make an effort to investigate in order to transcend opinion and forge criteria that nestle above it. More criteria and less opinion".
Although post-truth is a recent phenomenon, described by the Real Academia Española de la Lengua for the first time in 2017 as the "deliberate distortion of a reality, which manipulates beliefs and emotions in order to influence public opinion and social attitudes", the truth is that it This formula is not new and one only has to look at the political scene to understand the full extent of the phenomenon.. The Cleopatra pretext is still in vogue.
José Suárez de Lezo
Journalist and expert in political and corporate communication
He started his professional career at the daily ABC in 1999 and in 2004 he continued as head of communications in different bodies of the central government and the Community of Madrid. In 2007, he became responsible for the communications management of Vocento and in 2009 that of the Online Media Association (MediosOn), where he later took over as general manager. In 2015 he joined the Media Association and, at the same time, in 2016, he took part in the creation of the Journalism Laboratory of the Luca de Tena Foundationwhich he currently directs.