Disinformation as a political practice in the context of climate crises: between conceptual proliferation and activism

Abstract

The circulation of false information is often addressed through various categories, such as disinformation, fake news, and rumor. In Communication Studies, the perspective of informational disorder has become established. In other disciplines, such as Linguistics, Philosophy, and Public Health, terminologies like fake news, infodemic, and post-truth are more commonly used. Such conceptual diversity generates theoretical debates that often do not intersect. This variety is used to support accusations of spreading misleading content by political actors, who, in turn, criticize the methods of scientific truth verification, countering the accusations by labeling them as biased (towards the left of the political spectrum). Our paper aims to compare the concepts of disinformation stemming from political/institutional activism with those formulated in scientific practice. First, it maps the consensus and dissent in academic literature through a systematic review of texts indexed by SciELO between 2016 and 2024. It then examines how these agreements and disagreements have been mobilized by analyzing a corpus of 130,000 multiplatform posts (extracted from X, Instagram, and Facebook) that discuss the political disputes over what was considered disinformation during the climate disaster in Rio Grande do Sul. Finally, it assesses how these categories are used to defend or attack political viewpoints, demonstrating how the legitimization of the concepts of disinformation and information today is dependent on the social processes inherent to political activism.