A key consequence of the 2019 protests in Chile was a wave of misinformation. The seven categories of information disorder identified by the NGO First Draft (2019) were present in content shared from and about the protests. With people starting to use the term “fake news” in daily conversation, fact-checking as a journalistic genre had important growth: from 2 active fact-checking projects, there was a jump to 17, among them professional newsrooms, and both university and independent initiatives. The fact-checkers behind these projects recognised the urgent necessity of the context (Núñez-Mussa, 2019). At the time of writing this report, 13 of them were still active.
In parallel, the media began to introduce fact-checking practices for their published content with more intensity than ever before, as they were particularly observed and questioned about their coverage of the protests. “Everyone was seeing intentionality where there was none. Our challenge was very hard, because people were very angry”, mentioned one editor. At the same time, the media continuously received user-generated content, especially audiovisual material. Because of this, there was special preoccupation with monitoring television channels, due to a previous case where a station, after the 8M march, had shown out-of-context images corresponding to archive footage that was removed from the current moment.
Despite all the precautions taken by the media after the 2019 protests, part of the audience expressed an attitude of distrust towards the content. The most notorious example was one video, sent by users and broadcast by the public channel, which showed an intentional fire being set on the door of a bank. This video was widely disputed by other media, social media, and the national journalism association, even though the channel broadcast a verification process of it.
Some sections of the media have established handbooks with protocols to prevent the publication of misinformation, and they made temporary changes to their teams, in order to dedicate more journalists and time to this work. For instance, one organisation increased its internal fact-checking capacity from one to four people exclusively, with a policy of not publishing anything without passing through this process. After the four most intense months, two of these four people continued their work as fact-checkers. A similar experience was seen across all media organisations, with some variations. One journalist said: “We started to take fake news seriously during the 2019 protests. After a few days, we created a fact-checking team, which not only produced publishable articles, but also verified any dubious information received in the newsroom”. All the interviewed editors argued that they preferred losing a scoop over publishing content that is not fact-checked, and that they care, especially, about content received from social media.
