For Marijana Grbeša and Nebojša Blanuša, professors from the Faculty of Political Sciences, and Mato Brautović, professor from the University of Dubrovnik, who have, as researchers and collaborators on the Pro-fact project, participated in Gong's press conference on May 6th in Zagreb, disinformation pages function similarly as a jukebox, in which the topics change but the discourse remains the same. At the same time, the overall disinformation universe is extremely resistant - these are the conclusions of preliminary research on digital disinformation in Croatia.
Today, when we find it increasingly difficult to wade through piles of information, we realize that disinformation spreads faster than an infection, and that its consequences for society could be much more dangerous in the end. The danger of disinformation on Facebook lies in the use of populist narratives and conspiracy theories, the frequent use of intimidation, labeling and banalizing techniques, with one of the main predictors of conspiratorial thinking being the absence of political identification.
Our researchers were primarily interested in what the disinformation ecosystem looks like, who publishes the disinformation, what is the motivation behind its publication, and what methods and techniques are used to spread it - and if you are also interested in the answers to these questions, we have prepared a short video with our researchers, in which they discuss them!
You can watch the video below:
The conference is organized as part of the multidisciplinary project “Pro-fact: Research, education, fact-check and debunk COVID-19 related disinformation narratives in Croatia“, led by Gong. Through research, awareness raising and capacity building, the project comprehensively approaches the social, political and health problem of the dissemination of COVID-19 disinformation campaigns, together with our partners: Faculty of Political Science in Zagreb, University of Dubrovnik, Faktograf.hr, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, and Croatian Journalists Society (HND) and the Croatian Journalists’ Union (SNH).
