How misinformation and fear fuel America’s gun violence crisis

By David Naranjo Vice President of the Madrid Association of Mediation Disinformation and false news (fake news) are complex phenomena that have acquired unprecedented relevance in the context of digital society and the proliferation of social networks. Although they are often used as synonyms, it is important to differentiate them both in their nature and in their implications. Differences between disinformation and false news The term disinfor…

How misinformation and fear fuel America’s gun violence crisis

The data is clear: More guns don’t make people safer—they make people less safe, and make gun violence in the U.S. worse.

Disinformation appeals as a strategy to different emotional patterns depending on the social network in which they are disseminated. While in Tik Tok the misleading messages generate a greater sense of anger and disgust, in X (formerly Twitter) they are more associated with emotions such as the sadness and fear of the receiver, according to a study on the disinformation around the dana of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV). The study,…

Disinformation surrounds us, persecutes us and sometimes it is not easy to differentiate it from truthful and contrasted information. Because both pseudomedia (sometimes also in the media) and social networks appear messages that pretend to be news when they are not, but seek to deceive, manipulate or distort information with different interests.

It is a widespread prejudice that anger or fear cloud judgment and upset people therefore tend to believe in fake news. A new study has now been able to show that emotions per se do not make them more susceptible to false information.