Online disinformation on Facebook: the spread of fake news during the Portuguese 2019 election

Elections worldwide have been marked by the spread of fake news. Online disinformation is everywhere, used as a political weapon in the battlefield of manipulation. This study focused on the Portuguese 2019 elections to assess the reach of fake news compared to mainstream media news and to verify whether fake news had specific targets. We reviewed all posts (N=1197) from newspaper Facebook pages and fake news Facebook pages published during the campaign to verify their engagement. BuzzSumo assessed popularity by counting all posts’ shares, reactions and comments. Iramuteq software related the content of all published headlines by analyzing clusters of the most frequent words. Findings show that fake news had no greater reach than real news during the election campaign. However, fake news are more likely to be shared, while real news tend to get more reactions and more comments. In fake news headlines the terms associated with left-wing and government are the most common. The prime minister and the Socialist Party are associated with negative connotations. Results suggest that Portuguese fake news are related to rightwing extremism and publish hate content targeting corruption and leftist policies in general. Unlike other countries, anti-immigration discourse and fearmongering were not prominent contents.