Cases of Nepalese child and bomb threat called misinformation in European campaign

An alleged attack on a Nepalese child at a school in Lisbon and a justification for a bomb threat at Chegi’s headquarters are two of the most similar cases to disinformation that MediaLab reported during the European campaign.

According to the ISCTE-IUL-integrated Communication Sciences Research Centre, which partnered with the National Electoral Commission to detect fake news during the June 9 European elections, neither of these cases, however, is a typical example. misinformation.

The reason is due to the fact that in the first case it has not yet been possible to fully determine what happened, and in the second, although the fact (bomb threat) is true, the justification that it could be a former party activist demanding payment of a debt was still satirical content, republished as genuine.

According to the MediaLab report, which Lusa had access to, the case of the alleged child assault “created a cycle of information and subsequent disinformation that has increased polarization on social media on the issue of immigration.”

This incident is particularly complex, and its news coverage and dissemination of information, according to the report’s authors, is a “case study” that can help understand the dynamics of disinformation” during the election.

The contours of the case are not yet clear: the organization that reported it admitted an “error in the disclosure of information,” and the prosecutor’s office’s investigation has not yet been completed.

The original news story, which reported an attempted “lynching” of a Nepalese child by classmates at a school in the Lisbon area in a racist and xenophobic context, was the subject of a Ministry of Education note the next day denying the event. at least according to the terms and place in which the complaint was made.

The MediaLab report states that “the media reported this case based on information that turned out to be inaccurate, allowing anonymous users and political operatives to exploit it to advance their own political agendas.”

The entire case is “a paradigmatic example of how competition for attention among media outlets forces them to immediately reproduce news without ‘double checking,’ which is then used to further polarize political discourse,” the researchers say. in the Medialab.

In their opinion, analysis of social networks and media on this case proves that “immigration continues to be one of the main trends of disinformation in Europe and the mobilization of political discourse in Portugal two weeks before the elections to the European Parliament.”

According to the report, there were 94,885 interactions (sum of likes, shares, comments) on the Nepali child’s case on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter/X between May 14 (the date of the first news) and May 23.

As for the second incident – a bomb threat at the Chegi headquarters allegedly carried out by a former militant – it is considered by the report’s authors as “fraudulent content.”

This happens when someone uses irony or sarcasm, but many users do not understand and repost it as the truth, thereby giving it misinformation potential. The digital newspaper Poligrafo denied this news.

The researchers found “at least five fabricated news stories,” some of which had “characteristics typical of humor and satire pages, including the account that first posted the image.”

Depending on the exchange made, the satirical tone of the original publication may be lost, which, according to MediaLab researchers, is what happened in this case.

In total, the five accounts that posted the satirical news (among them a parody account of Chega leader Rita Mathias) received 1,333 interactions and a total of 73,040 views.