Banca de DEFESA: GUILHERME BRITO REIS

Fake News and Pandemic. An analysis of government fact-checking projects.

Government projects. Check. fake news. Pandemic. Coronavirus. Materiality.

This dissertation aims to analyze 16 government fact-checking projects. It starts from the hypothesis that these initiatives behave similarly to the production and dissemination of Fake News (FN) due to the fragility of their reference chains. The checking projects are described, who does them, the mediations in the material arrangements, without which the phenomenon is not widely understood. In addition, it shows how the federal government, state governments and other institutions linked to the legislature deal with the wave of Fake News (FN) about the pandemic, how they monitored the spread of false messages, what is the filtering and checking criteria for this content, also showing what they understand by Fake News (FN). A clipping was made of the checks published by the projects in the first year of the pandemic (or from the project creation date, for those implemented in 2021, until November 11, 2021, the date on which this collection began). The collected data were organized into analytical matrices based on the Theme, Source, Authorship and Origin of Fake News categories. At the end of the research, it was found that most projects confirm the hypothesis and there is a preference for checking content related to their respective institutions.