Since the north-american presidential election of 2016, the threat of ‘fake news’ and disinformation interference in elections has been raising concerns. The role of social media on the propagation of misleading news has been emphasized, as well as its instrumentalization by partisan groups interested in subverting the election process. The issue has been studied elsewhere but has not had enough attention in Portugal. In this article we analyse the contents of 47 Facebook pages and 39 Facebook groups during one month prior to the recent portuguese parliamentary election, on the 6th of October of 2019 to track disinformation news and analyse its content. Groups and pages to monitor were selected through a process that combined three criteria: the number of fans or members; the proportion of political content; and the number of posts in the past week. At first we analysed all posts, identifying trends, major content producers and differences between groups and pages. Then, we analysed individually a weekly selection of the 20 most viral posts that were published to determine if they were disinformative and of what type of disinformation. We concluded that disinformative content was prevalent in the pages and groups monitored, that several political actors had a relevant influence in the ensemble of issues discussed in those pages pages and groups and that most disinformation stemmed from the spinning of both mainstream and non-mainstream news to serve a political purpose. Although no direct interference in the electoral results was detected, several false news were monitored that may have influenced the voting behaviour of those exposed to them.

We would like to thank Miguel Paisana and Rita Sepúlveda for their acute reading of this working paper and their generous suggestions on improving it. We’re algo grateful to Cláudia Alvares for her methodological guidance and to Paulo Pena for spreadi

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disinformation,fake news,social media,elections