Framing Covid-19: how fact-checking circulate on the Facebook far-right

Abstract

This research focus on how fact-checking links circulate on Facebook groups/pages that also shared disinformation, particularly, the ones affiliated with the far-right. Through a three-step method that included content analysis, discursive analysis and social network analysis, we analyzed public 860 posts and found out that: while fact-checking does circulate on these groups, they tend to be framed as disinformation through posts on far-right ones, which we call “explicit framing”; the far-right groups tend to cluster around specific fact-checking links that are mostly shared without a framing text, but whose theme support their own ideological narrative (which we call “silent framing”) and; both explicit and silent framing tend to happen through populist discourse connections