Fake News Post-COVID-19

Dear Colleagues,

The dissemination of deliberately false information has worsened as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, entailing consequences for journalism and democracy. The pandemic has intensified a bad practice that was already on the rise in the field of political communication as a result of the discourse of politicians such as Donald Trump on platforms such as Twitter (Ross and Rivers, 2018). In fact, it has been confirmed that much of the misleading information concerning the coronavirus was received through social media and instant messaging systems (Nielsen et al., 2020). The growing proliferation of fake news has encouraged the academy to theorize about the types of hoaxes spreading in the digital environment (Salaverría et al., 2020) and their impact on the traditional media system (Casero-Ripollés, 2020). The study of fact checking as a practice to tackle misinformation has also awoken interest (Amazeen, 2020; Graves, 2017). In addition, the focus has been transferred to citizenship, especially to find out how social media users respond to fake news (Tandoc et al., 2020). However, these lines of research are still incipient, and we need more empirical work to improve the democratic quality of public debate and journalism in the post-COVID-19 era.

The generic aim of this Special Issue is to delve into the aforementioned lines of research. For this reason its scope extends to very diverse fields: journalism, political communication, sociology, ethics, fundamental rights and teaching, among others. In this respect, several specific goals are proposed in order to:

• Assess the impact of the rise of fake news in journalism and apply solutions to tackle it.
• Identify which factors and social actors influence the origin and viralization of fake news.
• Analyze the role of social media and instant messaging applications users in the spread of fake news.
• Investigate the consequences of the consumption of fake news in the civic and political attitudes and behaviors of citizens.
• Diagnose the main difficulties of citizens in detecting hoaxes and identify resources to remedy them.
• Include strategies and resources in the teaching of journalism to improve skills in verifying information in the digital environment.

Contributions have to follow one of the three categories of papers (article, conceptual paper or review) for the journal and address the topic of the Special Issue.

Prof. Dr. Amparo López-Meri
Prof. Dr. Carmen Costa-Sánchez
Prof. Dr. Silvia Marcos-García
Guest Editors

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