Desinformação em saúde e fact-checking: análise de estratégias narrativas em conteúdos verificados na América Latina

Abstract

The speed of dissemination of information provided by technologies, social networks and online platforms has increased the circulation of disinformation, which constitutes a threat to society due to its deliberately harmful nature and capacity to intentionally falsify and distort facts. In the opposite direction of disinformation, fact-checking services have established themselves as allies of individuals in the practice of their critical competence, however, especially in the healthcare field, this verification is complex and requires significant resources. Health disinformation is essentially harmful, given its propensity to negatively interfere with public health by inducing risky behavior and compromising the credibility of science and health institutions. This dissertation establishes as its general objective the analysis of the structure of disinformative content in health verified by Latin American fact-checking services, with the objective of identifying narrative patterns and recurrent disinformation strategies in the elaboration of these contents. To this end, a qualitative research was carried out, with an exploratory-descriptive approach and based on the document analysis of disinformative pieces verified by fact-checking services certified by the International Fact-Checking Network, using the content analysis technique. The results indicate that health disinformation is intentionally structured based on strategies frequently present in health-related content, which were systematized into 6 disinformative categories described and scrutinized in the research. It also points to the need to develop more effective and proactive mechanisms to mitigate the phenomenon of disinformation and it is concluded that tackling health disinformation requires interdisciplinary efforts, which combine the work of fact-checkers, researchers, health professionals and, above all, knowledge of the strategies used in the construction and dissemination of this content, to strengthen trust in science and promote the circulation of evidence-based information.