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@AtlanticCouncil’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. Catalyzing a global network of digital forensic researchers, following conflicts in real time.

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Spanish-language COVID fact-checking spun for political purposes

@DFRLab
8 min readAug 4, 2020

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(Source: @saiphcita/UNAM Civic Innovation Lab)

Understanding the audience

The graph shows several different data points. Each point represents an account that engaged with one of the two fact-checking organizations on Twitter. The X-axis shows the total number of original tweets that a given account created on its timeline, and the Y-axis represents the number of retweets that the content from the audience member received. (Source: @saviaga/UNAM Civic Innovation Lab)
Graph showing the connections that emerged from tweets engaging with the two fact-checking organizations. The nodes’ labels are based on in-degree scores. The audience of @covidmx was also much larger, with 19,796 members vs. 626 for @esp_covid19. (Source: @estebanpdl/DFRLab)
Screengrab of @covidmx fact-checked content. The image shows the organization debunking a tweet from priest Alejandro Solalinde, a religious leader in Mexico. (Source: @covidmx/archive)
Screengrab of an account that mentions political actors and journalists. (Source: @pechugo66/archive)
Screengrab showing a post from a Twitter account, mentioning @covidmx and Mexico’s former president, Felipe Calderón. (Source: @jelosantana/archive)
Screengrab from Mexico’s former president Calderón quoting a tweet from @covidmx. Here ex-President Calderón says that @covidmx is showing that the Mexican government is not accurately reporting the COVID-19 death toll in the country. (Source: @FelipeCalderon/archive)
Screengrab from @RicardoDGPS, the Mexican government’s director of health promotion. Here, the government official is thanking @covidmx for reporting that the government had discrepancies in the number of death tolls they reported. It mentions as well that the organization helped them to detect and correct the error. The tweet came out hours before President Calderon’s tweet. (Source: @RicardoDGPS/archive)
Screengrab from political influencer and former Mexican federal deputy Fernando Belaunzaran who is tagging @covidmx in a tweet where he is attacking the current Mexican president (Source: @ferbelaunzaran/archive)
Screengrab from an account that is questioning the political neutrality of @covidMX after the Mexican ex-president decided to quote them (Source: @sg_pero/archive)

Understanding the audience’s content

Most-used hashtags and bigrams the audience used when discussing the fact checking organizations. (Source: @saviaga/UNAM Civic Innovation Lab)

Audiences with bot-like behavior

Overview of the accounts with a high Botometer score and the hashtags and bigrams they used. These bot-like accounts mostly posted about healthcare but also diverged into politics at times. (Source: @saviaga/UNAM Civic Innovation Lab)

Implications

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DFRLab
DFRLab

Published in DFRLab

@AtlanticCouncil’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. Catalyzing a global network of digital forensic researchers, following conflicts in real time.

@DFRLab
@DFRLab

Written by @DFRLab

@AtlanticCouncil's Digital Forensic Research Lab. Catalyzing a global network of digital forensic researchers, following conflicts in real time.

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