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.

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.