Banca de DEFESA: SANDRO VALERIO GONCALVES MARTINS

FAKE NEWS SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS, CURRENT PERSPECTIVES OF FALSE NEWS

Fake News, social representations, psychosocial processes, post-truth, fake news.

This dissertation work aimed to identify and analyze the social representations linked to Fake News, from the perspective of the theory of social representations (S. Moscovici), especially using the structural approach, in order to identify and organize representations in the of concept maps to enable a better analysis of the structure of the central elements of possible social representations. For this purpose, a form was created in Google Forms and using social networks for its dissemination, the participation of 100 people from different states of the country, aged between 18 and 80 years and of different educational levels, was obtained. This research was characterized by a quantitative/qualitative approach, composed of a socio-representational questionnaire, with semi-structured questions (open and closed), seeking to distinguish the structure of the social representations of Fake News from data of free evocations and associated behaviors. With the help of textual analysis software and using the lexicography of the terms found, we can identify the social representations in relation to the term Fake News, as organic assumptions, which showed a possible social construction of a central core and a peripheral core related to the inductive term. We also verified the existence of a stereotype that relates negative elements to the term Fake News, intensely connected to political activities, social networks and conventional media.