Abstract

MENDEZ-MAJUELOS, María Inés; MELERO-PETIT, Inés María  and  DOMINGUEZ-GARCIA, Ricardo. From strategy to veracity: the behaviour of Spanish political leaders at the beginning of the vaccination against COVID-19. Universitas [online]. 2023, n.38, pp.211-230. ISSN 1390-8634.  https://doi.org/10.17163/uni.n38.2023.09.

Twitter has become the Internet social network of choice for most political leaders and its use was significant during the hardest months of COVID-19. This paper analyzes the effects that the speeches of the main political leaders in Spain have had on the management of the communication of COVID-19, in order to verify how their speech has influenced transparency and the increase in disinformation in this moment. Likewise, these data will allow us to observe which communication techniques have been used by the most representative figures linked to the management of the pandemic. Based on a triple approach methodological basis, a quantitative, qualitative and discursive content analysis will be carried out, analyzing the data with the SPSS tool, version 25. The results obtained show how institutional sources have propagated opinionated content on Twitter. more than informative. We also verify that the saturation of messages in the network has given rise to a greater use of fallacy mechanisms by the institutional subjects analyzed and, therefore, it has been possible to determine that the way in which communication has been managed about COVID-19 has contributed to the increase in misinformation. Hand in hand with the new emerging narratives, social technology and artificial intelligence to know the citizen opinion of the transparency portals.

Keywords : Twitter; COVID-19; political communication; disinformation; politicians; speeches; transparency; Spain.