The Discursive Effects of Disinformation Regarding the Pinochet Dictatorship in the Digital Environment

This article analyzes discursive representations of the Chilean civil-military dictatorship (1973–1990) that circulated on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) between 2020 and 2023, focusing on discourses related to the Augusto Pinochet regime and the dissemination of fake news, disinformation, and historical revisionism in the contemporary Chilean context. The research is grounded in the dialogue between Digital Discourse Analysis—particularly the technodiscursive strategies proposed by Marie-Anne Paveau—and Dialogic Discourse Analysis, based on the contributions of Bakhtin’s Circle. The corpus includes posts from the profiles of Chilean public figures and anonymous users. In this article, two examples from each category are analyzed qualitatively, seeking to understand the discursive strategies employed and the social voices that permeate these utterances. The results show that the analyzed posts reframe historical events, producing effects of meaning that downplay human rights violations and strain collective memories. We identify denialist and revisionist discourses linked to digital disinformation, which challenge the legitimacy of historical narratives regarding the Pinochet era. We conclude that the circulation of these discourses on digital social media intensifies disputes over memory, contributes to the destabilization of democratic consensus, and undermines the credibility of historical accounts and democratic institutions.