Visualization of the context of fake news to understand the infodemic

Abstract

COVID-19 has not only caused the largest global crisis of our time, it has also caused a "massive infodemic", which is the way the World Health Organization (WHO) calls the amount of false information that spins around the pandemic. For this reason, fact-checking has become the tool of journalism that helps the general public to
discern between deceptions, scams, decontextualizations and reality. To achieve this, this research was based on the verifications of the Ecuador Chequea platform but applied qualitative criteria such as type of source or the emotions produced by fake news to obtain as a result visualizations that allow understanding links between
misinformation that would not be possible otherwise. . The result of this work is a series of representations that help to understand the environment in which disinformation arises and spreads and that can be replicated in other circumstances.