Fake News in Slovakia

Media Literacy In this entry I will summarize the findings of the report “ Sense Wanted: Resilience to ‘Post-Truth’and its Predictors in the New Media Literacy Index 2018” (Lessenski, 2018), which analyzed 35 European countries in terms of their media literacy and potential to withstand fake news. At the end it will be discussed how this report relates to Slovakia in particular. First of all, author of the report, Marin Lessenski, identified highest media literacy in the Northwestern European countries like Finland, Denmark or the Netherlands, while the lowest scores were in Southeast Europe in countries like Macedonia, Turkey and Albania. Moreover, the trend was that countries with the highest levels of media literacy had the best education performance and the highest degree of media freedom. Secondly, Lessenski argued that there is a number of reasons why fake news has a potential of being powerful. The reasons reside in the nature of fake news - spreading faster when e...

Slovak Presidential Elections 2019 This year Slovakia held presidential elections. The goal of this entry is to analyze the elections through the lens of fake news, conspiracies, disinformation and propaganda. In case these phenomena did intervene in the elections, the main questions are, who were the candidates that were the main subjects of disinformation, what was the nature of the disinformation, and who distributed it? An analysis of 649 Facebook entries regarding presidential elections posted by 14 most relevant fake news channels has been published in a combined study by STRATPOL, MEMO98, SSPI and GLOBSEC ( Kandrík, Kužel, Masariková, & Sawiris, 2019). According to Kandrík et al. most influential of these channels were Hlavné správy, Hrica Lubos, InfoVojna, ĽUBOŠ BLAHA and Sila Pravdy. The analysis suggests that 208 of the disinformation posts had a positive tone and 84% of them were specifically associated with presidential candidate Štefan Harabin. On the other h...

The Vaccination Debate While it is true that fake news and disinformation tend to touch upon a number of different topics, very few of them (if not none of them) bear more importance than human health. One of the most prominent health-related issues subject to disinformation is vaccination. In fact, the issue has been so significant that the World Health Organization ranked it among ten threats to global health in 2019. Additionally, in Slovakia it can be observed that the public opinions on vaccination have been ambiguous and quite vocal even though they did not always correspond with the position of health professionals. In the recent years, a number of anti-vaccination initiatives immerged in Slovakia. One of such movements would be for example “ Iniciatíva pre uvedomenie si rizík očkovania ” (transl. Initiative for awareness of vaccination risks). At first sight, the website of the organization appears to be genuinely credible and veracious. The website cites different sour...

Fake News in Slovakia (Negative Space, 2019)  The term fake news in the context of Slovak media came to my attention just a few years ago. Since then I have noticed an increased number of controversial and alternative stories spreading mostly through social media. These stories often challenged the credibility of information provided by standard media and made many people believe that the media are being controlled by puppet masters who prevent people from knowing the “real truth”. Moreover, I noticed in several people in my vicinity (especially in elderly people) a shift towards mistrust and cynicism regarding topics like politics, health, history, economics and media.   By the words “mistrust” and “cynicism” I mean that these people either stopped pursuing an active interest in these topics or started to gravitate towards information and opinions that are alternative to those published by standard media. The aim of this blog is to investigate and evaluate the effect...