Desinformación Populista en Redes Socialesla Tuitosfera del Juicio del Procés

Resumen

This article explores the phenomenon of populist misinformation in the online space, using the conversation held on Twitter concerning the trial of the Procésas a case study. By way of a sample of 175,977 tweets published during 2019 and the segmentation of users into categories, the key actors were identified, and the most relevant contents were extracted using trigram and term frequency analysis. The resultsshow the large citizen mobilisation led by civil pro-independence organisations and popular-based movements such as the Tsunami Democrátic, as opposed to the secondary role of political parties and the media, as well as the marginal adherence of public institutions to the hashtags that channelled the online conversation. The political and ideological slogans of pro-independence and unionists definedthe conversation, leaving the discussion of objective questions of a legal and political nature in the background and thereby contributing to the confusion around concepts such as democracy or self-determination. Spaces prone to the generation and dissemination of populist misinformation are identified in two segments of the sample: the one classified as unionist and the more radicalised sector of the pro-independence population. The discourse of the former is characterised by outrage at the street riots following the sentence and by the defence of police actions, without the voice of moderate unionism being heard; and that of the latter, by calls for civil disobedience and confrontation against the Spanish State and against the Catalan politicians themselves. Forces are detected in the online space that are practically invisible outside the online world, and the concept of demotics emerges as opposition to politics. The results obtained contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenon of online disinformation and its relationship with populist discourse.