According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report (Newman et al., 2019), Portuguese people show a rather high level of trust in the news (58%), but this percentage goes down to 26.7 per cent when that news comes to them through social media. This is increasingly relevant because more and more people in the country choose social media as their primary source of information. In 2019, 81.2 per cent still referred to television as their main source for news, but the figure was very close to the Internet plus social media together (79.8%). Just for comparison, the print press is selected as a primary source of information only by 36.2 per cent. The most popular social media in Portugal, Facebook, is regularly used by 76.9 per cent of citizens, and 52.9 per cent of them specifically use it to get news. 23.8 per cent do the same with YouTube, 20 per cent with Facebook Messenger, 14.8 per cent with WhatsApp, and 11.7 per cent with Instagram.
In global terms, 74.7 per cent of the respondents in the Digital News Report 2019 say they are concerned with the veracity of what they see on the Internet, compared with 71.3 per cent in 2018. This is the second-highest percentage among the 38 countries covered by the report, the highest being Brazil (85%) and the lowest being the Netherlands (31%). This shows how fake news and disinformation are a matter of great concern in recent years, and a couple of initiatives have appeared to deal with the problem. One of them is the project Monitoring of Propaganda and Disinformation in Social Media, launched by MediaLab (2020), a specialised observatory at an institute integrated into the University of Lisbon (CIES_Iscte). They generate weekly reports about political disinformation in social media and they also cooperate with the national news agency (Lusa) in a fact-checking project, supported by the EU and the European Parliament: Combat to fake news – A democratic question (Lusa, 2020). Another well-known fact-checking initiative is the website Polígrafo, launched and run by a team of journalists, defining itself as “a journalistic online project whose main purpose is to find the truth – and not the lie – in the public space” (Polígrafo, 2020). They call themselves “the first fact-checking Portuguese newspaper”, and got much more visibility after they made a partnership with leading television channel SIC and began broadcasting a 30-minute weekly programme on prime time.
Since 2019, Polígrafo has been a partner of Facebook’s international fact-checking programme. Another Portuguese publication, the online-only Observador (one of the news media from our sample) is also a partner of Facebook’s International Fact-Checking Network, an initiative developed in collaboration with the Poynter Institute (Pinheiro, 2019). Observador regularly publishes a section called “Fact Check”. Investigative journalism has also been interested in what lies behind fake news and their fabricators. A journalist from the daily Diário de Notícias has been publishing very relevant information about this, and recently published a book (Factory of lies). In this book he reveals that in Portugal there are presently “more than 40 websites creating lies” that are diffused through social media, particularly Facebook, with its 3.5 million Portuguese users (Pena, 2019: 12).
All the editors interviewed for this research project showed much concern about the serious problems of disinformation and “fake news”, especially in social media. They all now have special teams to deal with those networks (which they also use as distributers of their own news) and to pay attention to “what’s going on” in Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, but none of them has any particular internal rules to manage the issue of disinformation.
