Teorias da Conspiração em Tempos de Pandemia Covid-19: Populismo, Media Sociais e Desinformação

Gil Baptista Ferreira

doi:10.17231/comsoc.40(2021).3324

Authors

Gil Baptista Ferreira Núcleo de Investigação em Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Escola Superior de Educação, Instituto Politécnico de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal/LabCom – Comunicação e Artes, Faculdade de Artes e Letras, Universidade da Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5917-1248

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17231/comsoc.40(2021).3324

Keywords:

media, social media, misinformation, conspiracy theories, covid-19, infodemic

Abstract

Social media platforms have for a long time been recognized as great disseminators of misinformation on health. Previous studies found a positive association between the use of social media as the main source of information and the acceptance of forms of misinformation, such as conspiracy theories. The association between populist attitudes and the valuation of information through social media is also described. From a questionnaire applied to 242 respondents after the first state of emergency of the covid-19 pandemic (March 2020) in Portugal, this study aims to identify the background and pre-requisites for the belief in misinformation. The data obtained suggest that individuals with populist feelings have less trust in institutional strategies to fight the pandemic, privileging social media as a source of information and revealing a greater acceptance of the conspiracy theories on the disease. The connection, documented in the literature, between the belief in conspiracy theories and risk behaviours recommends that measures be adopted to combat misinformation factors.

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Author Biography

Gil Baptista Ferreira, Núcleo de Investigação em Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Escola Superior de Educação, Instituto Politécnico de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal/LabCom – Comunicação e Artes, Faculdade de Artes e Letras, Universidade da Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal

Gil Baptista Ferreira has a PhD and is an associate in communication sciences, coordinating professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra, the director of the Master in New Media. He is a researcher at Research Center in Social and Human Sciences and at LabCom – Communication and Arts, in the Communication and Media group, and his interests focus on studying the relationship between new media and social life. More specifically, Gil Baptista Ferreira studies issues related to political communication in the digital age and the most recent developments in the field of journalism, particularly those related to citizenship practices. He has published articles in scientific journals and collective volumes in several European countries and Brazil. He is the author of the books Linguagem e Modernidade (Language and Modernity, 2003), Comunicação, Media e Identidade (Communication, Media and Identity, 2009), Novos Media e Vida Cívica (New Media and Civic Life; 2013), and Sociologia dos Novos Media (New Media Sociology, 2018).

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