In Europe, the spread of fake news that causes disinformation depends significantly on the topic in question, but also on the country, with notable differences between Italy, France, Germany and the United Kingdom: this was discovered by the study by Ca’ Foscari University of Venice published in the magazine Plos One, which analyzed the activity between 2019 and 2021 on the then Twitter, focusing on topics such as Coronavirus, anti-Covid vaccines and Brexit. The results indicate that in our country disinformation concerns less than in other Covid and Coronavirus cases, but is more problematic for issues such as Brexit: this underlines how the initiatives implemented to combat these phenomena must take into account the different contexts and cultural factors if they want to be really effective.
“The data indicates that the majority of people only use sources considered reliable”, Alessandro Galeazzi, co-author together with Anees Baqir of the study coordinated by Fabiana Zollo, tells ANSA, “something quite common on all social networks also because the fortunately, there are more reliable sources than unreliable ones, while a small part is based only on unreliable sources: people are usually on one side or the other, the middle ground is rarer”.
The news sources were classified as reliable or not based on the NewsGuard score, a tool that evaluates the reliability of newspapers. Overall, Germany was the country with the highest ratio of retweets of unreliable to reliable news, followed by France and then Italy and the United Kingdom. Looking at the various topics in detail, Italy recorded the lowest percentage of retweets of questionable news on the topic of Coronavirus, but was instead in first place for the use of unsafe sources on Brexit.
“The idea is that different contexts can react to the same disinformation intervention in different ways, for cultural, social reasons, etc.,” says Galeazzi. “Therefore, European coordination attempts to stem disinformation should take into account the fact that there are different cultural contexts – concludes the researcher – and be consistent with this fact”.
