Robot Strategies for Combating Disinformation in Election Campaigns

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the current state of affairs in one sole country, namely Spain, in order to inquire into how its political parties and fact-checking organizations deal with disinformation during election campaigns, and the type of measures that they adopt, where appropriate, to combat it. Fact-checking organizations are understood as nonpartisan and nonprofit consumer watchdogs for voters, whose aim is to reduce the levels of mendacity and confusion in politics. The journalists working for fact-checking organizations claimed that they were unaware of the tools employed by political parties, even while recognizing their widespread use for segmenting messages and making them go viral during election campaigns. The study of disinformation during election campaigns and its tactical use by political parties and organizations should always be supplemented with field research on the same tool that allows for verification of the information that they offer when broaching the subject of their campaign strategies.