After the 2016 US presidential elections, the term ‘fake news’ became synonymous with disinformation and a catch-all term for the problems that social networks were bringing to communication. Four years later, there are dozens of empirical studies that have attempted to describe and analyse an issue that, despite still being in the process of definition, has been identified as one of the key COVID-19 cyberthreats by Interpol, is considered a threat to democracy by many states and supranational institutions and, as a consequence, is subject to regulation or even criminalization. These legislative and criminal policy interventions form part of the first stage in the construction of a moral panic that may lead to the restriction of freedom of expression and information. By analysing empirical research that attempts to measure the extent of the issue and its impact, the present article aims to provide critical reflection on the process of constructing fake news as a threat. Via a systematic review of the literature, we observe, firstly, that the concept of fake news used in empirical research is limited and should be refocused because it has not been constructed according to scientific criteria and can fail to include relevant elements and actors, such as governments and traditional media. Secondly, the article analyses what is known scientifically about the extent, consumption and impact of fake news and argues that it is problematic to establish causal relationships between the issue and the effects it has been said to produce. This conclusion requires us to conduct further research and to reconsider the position of fake news as a threat as well as the resulting regulation and criminalization.

This article analyses Spanish media treatment of a certain type of immigrant: the unaccompanied foreign minor ('MENA' in Spanish). The media play an important role in creating and disseminating ideas and images amongst the general public, thereby promoting the articulation of sets of meanings called discourses. The main goal of this research is to identify the discursive approaches that have been constructed around the term “MENA” in the main Spanish daily newspapers. To this end, we gathered and analysed all the news reports published between January 2017 and October 2019 by the digital editions of the four most widely-read newspapers in Spain (La Vanguardia, El País, El Mundo and ABC). This analysis was performed using text mining techniques (an important field in data science) such as term frequency, inverse document frequency, and correlation networks between words. Our results show that the term “MENA” evokes a criminalising, moralistic, welfare-dependent discourse that is articulated from an adult-centric, nationalist perspective. The study concluded that the conservative press uses the acronym more frequently than the left-wing media. However, no significant discursive differences were observed between conservative and progressive press in terms of the language used, which often had negative connotations that stigmatised the young people concerned. Este artículo tiene como objeto abordar el tratamiento mediático realizado por la prensa española sobre una tipología de inmigrante: el menor extranjero no acompañado «MENA». Los medios de comunicación tienen un papel relevante en la creación y difusión de conceptos e imágenes entre el público, de tal modo, promueven la articulación de conjuntos de significados llamados discursos. La investigación se propone identificar los enfoques discursivos construidos en torno a la sigla «MENA» en los principales diarios de la prensa española. Para llevar a cabo esta tarea se han recopilado y analizado todas las piezas informativas publicadas sobre menores migrantes en las ediciones digitales de los cuatro diarios más leídos en España (La Vanguardia, El País, El Mundo y ABC) entre el 1 de enero de 2017 y 31 de octubre de 2019. Estas piezas han sido analizadas mediante técnicas de minería de datos (un área relevante dentro de la ciencia de datos) tales como la observación de «term frequency» y de «inverse document frequency». Estas técnicas, junto a la construcción de redes de correlaciones entre palabras, han permitido observar que el término «MENA» evoca un discurso asistencialista, criminalizador y moralista desde un enfoque adultocéntrico y nacionalista. Asimismo, se concluye que la prensa conservadora usa más la sigla que la prensa progresista, pero sin divergencias significativas en el lenguaje utilizado.

In recent decades, many sectors of our society have been digitized, and much of our life has moved to cyberspace, especially in terms of entertainment. Users meet, relate, and cooperate in the new public space that is the internet and form digital communities. Video games play a leading role in the formation of such communities. However, these communities also present antisocial behaviors, ranging from disruptive actions to harassment and hate speech. Such behaviors, encompassed under the umbrella term toxicity, are a major concern for both users and those in charge of moderating these spaces. This article focuses on toxicity in today’s leading online video game League of Legends. Three hundred twenty-eight matches were reviewed using a system of two judges to study the prevalence of these problematic behaviors. We find that 70% of matches were affected by disruptive behavior. Nevertheless, only 10.9% of the analyzed matches were exclusively affected by downright harmful behavior. In our view, the results have relevant implications for content moderation policy that are also addressed in this paper.

The emergence of algorithmic tools and Artificial Intelligence and their use in criminal justice has raised a relevant theoretical and political debate. This article unpacks and synthesizes the debate on the role of causality for the scientific method to analyze predictive decision support systems, their practical value and epistemic problems. As a result of this discussion, it is argued that the measured usage of theory and causation-based algorithms is preferable over correlational (i.e., causally opaque) algorithms as support tools in the penal system. At the same time, the usage of the latter is supported when it is critically accompanied by abductive reasoning. Finally, the arguments put forth in this article suggest that the field of criminology needs a deeper epistemological understanding of the scientific value of data-driven tools in order to entertain a serious debate on their use.