Polarization, misinformation and expressions of hate on Twittercase of nationalist and pro-independence political groups in Spain

Resumen

This work aimsto identify the use of polarization as a communication resource, the co-occurrence of disinformation content, and hate speech published by nationalist and independentist political groups in Spain through Twitter. The study performs a topic analysis of 13,225 tweets in Spanish published on Twitter by the political groups analyzed, collected between September 1, 2019, and February 29, 2020, which are compared with the 2,730 disinformation content collected between September 1, 2019, and February 29, 2020, for two Fact-Checking journalistic projects in Spain (Maldita.es and Newtral.es). The results show us a communicative scenario, at the level of the political groups studied, in which polarization is used as a strategy to attract potential voters from digital scenarios such as Twitter. In addition, it recognized a more significant presence of hate speech with a neutral semantic load, and a low level of co-occurrence is observed concerning the disinformation content identified in the Fact-Checking projects taken as study cases. The analyzed scenario contributes to the polarization and normalization of hate and confrontation expressions, favouring the proliferation of prejudices at the level of Spanish public opinion on Twitter.