This article explores the uses of sources in coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in social media posts of mainstream news organizations in Brazil, Chile, Germany, Mexico, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. Based on computational content analysis, our study analyzes the sources and actors present in more than 940,000 posts on COVID-19 published in the 227 Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts of 78 sampled news outlets between January 1 and December 31 of 2020, comparing their relative importance across countries, across media platforms, and across time as the pandemic evolved in each country. The analysis shows the dominance of political sources across countries and platforms, particularly in Latin America, demonstrating a strong role of the state in constructing pandemic news and suggesting that mainstream news organizations' social media posts maintain a strong elite orientation. Health sources were also prominent — consistent with the defining role of biomedical authority in health coverage—, while significant diversity of sources, including citizen sources, emerged as the pandemic went on. Our results also revealed that the use of specific sources significantly varied over time. These variations tend to go hand in hand with specific global milestones of the pandemic.

Resilience thinking is critical for improving disaster preparedness, response, and adaptation. While there are several strategies focused on assessing resilience capacity in human communities, there are few strategies focused on fostering resilience thinking. Game-based learning is an active and immersive teaching strategy that can foster complex skills such as resilience. However, this field needs further research in terms of its potential to strengthen community resilience to disasters. In this paper, we validated a serious game to foster community resilience. We present the collaborative creation process for the development of the board game Costa Resiliente, and its subsequent migration into a video game. We have developed an experimental study to evaluate the contributions of the mobile game against the board game. The result is a technological tool based on scientific knowledge to foster resilience thinking in coastal human communities exposed to hazards. The board game was developed using data from local research on community resilience, and from experts in emergency planning and developing games collected in focus groups. The board game’s effect on fostering resilience thinking was validated with school students from a coastal town. During the migration process into a video game, we used a design thinking methodological approach for the co-creation of audiovisual elements, in which beneficiaries participate actively and early. Through this approach, visual and auditory elements that are familiar to coastal communities were integrated into the video game elements. Our study indicates that game-based learning is a useful approach to foster resilience thinking, and that a better gaming experience can be provided by a video game. The potential of this video game for educating young age groups about community resilience is further discussed.

Citizens get informed, on a daily basis, from social networks in general and from the media in particular. Accordingly, the media are increasingly expressing their concern about phenomena related to disinformation. This article presents an analysis of the social networks of 159 Chilean media that, over 5 years, referred to fake news or disinformation on 10,699 occasions. Based on data science strategies, the Queltehue platform was programmed to systematically track the information posted by 159 media on their social networks (Instagram, Facebook and Twitter). The universe of data obtained (13 million news items) was filtered with a specific query to reach 10,699 relevant posts, which underwent textual computer analysis (LDA) complemented with manual strategies of multimodal discourse analysis (MDA). Among the findings, it is revealed that the recurrent themes over the years have mostly referred to fake news and politics and fake news related to health issues. This is widely explained on the grounds of a political period in Chile which involved at least five electoral processes, in addition to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Regarding the multimodal analysis, it is observed that when the dissemination of fake news involves well-known figures such as politicians or government authorities, an image or a video in which such figure appears is used. In these cases, two phenomena occur: (a) these figures have the opportunity to rectify their false or misinforming statements or (b) in most cases, their statements are reiterated and end up reinforcing the controversy. In view of these results, it seems necessary to ask whether this is all that can be done and whether this is enough that communication can do to guarantee healthy and democratic societies.

Se analiza el uso de fuentes en redes sociales de nueve medios de información de referencia en Chile frente al Covid-19. Se identificaron los tipos de fuentes más utilizados, su evolución en el tiempo, así como las diferencias encontradas entre distintas plataformas de redes sociales de los medios chilenos. Específicamente, se extrajeron 838.618 publicaciones de medios nacionales desde Facebook, Instagram y Twitter entre enero y diciembre de 2020. A ese corpus se aplicó un primer proceso de machine learning (MA) para filtrar automáticamente 168.250 publicaciones que incluían palabras claves que identifican su contenido con el Covid-19. A partir de una lista de 2.130 entidades, se utilizó otro proceso de MA para aplicar un conjunto de reglas basadas en la presencia de verbos declarativos o de expresiones comunes usadas por los medios cuando se cita a una entidad, así como el uso de dos puntos o de comillas, con el objeto de detectar distintos tipos de fuentes en el contenido informativo. Los resultados muestran que el uso que los medios chilenos dieron a distintas voces en sus redes sociales favoreció ampliamente a las fuentes políticas, seguidas por las fuentes de salud, y más desde lejos por las ciudadanas, académico-científicas y económicas. Aunque la jerarquía de las fuentes que se usó para narrar la crisis sanitaria tendió a mantenerse estable, tuvo matices a lo largo del tiempo y su variación dependió de los hitos que marcaron la historia del país. Al analizar el uso de fuentes según plataforma, se observa a Twitter como menos pluralista, dando espacio a un grupo más restringido de voces e intensificando la presencia de las fuentes políticas por sobre las demás; en especial, por sobre las ciudadanas. Finalmente, nuestro estudio reveló diferencias significativas en las fuentes utilizadas por publicaciones de origen televisivo, particularmente en el uso de fuentes políticas, de salud y ciudadanas, las cuales tuvieron una presencia mayor que en los demás tipos de medios

Strengthening critical thinking abilities of citizens in the face of news published on the web represents a key challenge for education. Young citizens appear to be vulnerable in the face of poor quality news or those containing nonexplicit ideologies. In the field of data science, computational and statistical techniques have been developed to automatically collect and characterize online news media in real time. Nevertheless, there is still not a lot of interdisciplinary research on how to design data exploration platforms supporting an educational process of critical citizenship. This article explores this opportunity through a case study analyzing critical thinking ability of students when facing news dealing with the social mobilization “No+APF”. From data collected through 4 online exercises conducted by 75 secondary school students, 55 university students and 25 communication specialists, we investigate to what extent young citizens are able to classify news headlines and ideological orientation of news media outlets. We also question the influence of the media’s brand name and the subjectivity of each participant in regards to the social mobilization “No+APF”. The results underline the importance of group work, the influence of the brand name and the correlation between criticalthinking abilities and having a defined opinion. Fortalecer el pensamiento crítico de ciudadanos frente a noticias de Internet representa un desafío educativo clave. Los jóvenes ciudadanos parecen vulnerables frente a noticias de mala calidad u orientaciones ideológicas poco explícitas. Desde la ciencia de datos se desarrollan técnicas informáticas y estadísticas para recopilar prensa digital en tiempo real y caracterizarla automáticamente. Sin embargo, existe poca investigación interdisciplinar para diseñar plataformas de exploración de datos al servicio de un proceso educativo de ciudadanía crítica. Este artículo investiga esa oportunidad, mediante un estudio de caso en Chile que analiza la capacidad crítica del alumnado frente a noticias de un hecho social relevante: la movilización social «No+AFP». A partir de cuatro tareas en línea ?realizadas por 75 estudiantes de secundaria, 55 estudiantes universitarios y 25 especialistas en comunicación? preguntamos en qué medida los jóvenes son capaces de calificar titulares de prensa y orientaciones ideológicas de medios de comunicación. Por otra parte, analizamos la influencia de la marca del medio y de la subjetividad que, frente al movimiento social «No+AFP», imprime cada participante al pensamiento crítico. Los resultados obtenidos destacan la relevancia del trabajo en grupo, la influencia de la marca del medio de prensa y la correlación entre tener una opinión definida y la capacidad crítica.

Traditional media sources have adopted Twitter as a canal to broadcast information across digital audiences. This study has the objective of analyzing the characteristics of the tweets published by Spanish media sources during the twelve months in which presidential electoral processes took place. This was done to test the differences in the use of this platform, according to the content of the coverage, and the phase in which it was published. Our research uses a quantitative methodology, where we used computerized content analysis for Twitter publications that different media made during 2015 and 2016. Our results revealed a promotional use of tools such as the hashtag, or mentions in media with less followers. At the same time, political information was characterized by containing a higher use of mentions and statements by the candidates, especially during the election campaigning, favoring the creation of echo chambers in the political Twittersphere.