Life, death and memes: Analyzing the interplay between memetic content and fake news on abortion in Argentina and euthanasia in Spain

TARULLO, RAQUEL; SAMPIETRO AGNESE

Valencia

Conferencia; Pre conference IAMC; 2019

Online Journalism Research

Concern about the role that fake news has been playing in public discourse is widespread (cf., for example, Lazer et al., 2018). Even though this phenomenon has a long history and many articles have been written about the consequences that fake news bring into the democratic realm (Asch et al., 2018; Friedland, Joseph, Swire-Thompson, Grinberg, & Lazer, 2019; Waisbord, 2018), currently the popularization of social media has become crucial in the dissemination and promotion of deliberately false stories that try to gain ideological support or advertising revenue (Tucker et al., 2018). While there have been attempts to tackle the spread of misinformation, especially in polarized scenarios, consequence of controversial topics (Clavero, 2018; Guess, Montgomery, Lyons, Nyhan, & Reifler, 2019; Guess, Nagler, & Tucker, 2019; Tucker et al., 2018; Waisbord, 2018), the influence of memes in this field has not yet been fully analyzed (Smith, 2019), even if memes are designed to become viral (Milner, 2013).The present study aims to analyze the structure of memetic content about two very polarized private and public issues: abortion and euthanasia, by drawing on two case studies from two different geographical contexts: the debate about the legalization of abortion in Argentina in 2018 and the public discourse on euthanasia in Spain before the 2019 national election campaign