Relaciones públicas y fake news en la comunicación corporativa. Una revisión de la literatura

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to start from the concept of fake news applied, in this case, not to journalistic information, but to the field of companies to determine how information and institutional communication can be distorted, and even attacked, by the dissemination of unverified (or malicious) information through the enormous dissemination provided by new technologies derived from the Internet, mainly social networks. This virality brought about by the digitalization of information and data can lead to truly damaging discredit for the trust of organizations among their different audiences. Precisely, the relational perspective (Grunig & Hung-Baesecke, 2015; Ledingham, 2015) maintains that the nature of public relations lies in its ability to manage relationships between an organization and its public of interest or stakeholders (Grunig, 2009) through through a strategically planned process (Otero and Pulido-Polo, 2018; Almiron & Xifra, 2019; Page & Parnel, 2019; Smith, 2017) capable of placing before public opinion (Greenhill, 2020) the excellence of organizational behavior. The purpose of this process is none other than to generate trust in the public, but its main obstacle, since the origin of public relations, has been public misinformation.To achieve the main objective of this paper, an exploratory methodological design is carried out, of a qualitative nature, in two phases: data collection and analysis. For the collection of data, the techniques of direct observation, participant observation and the use of data from secondary sources, eminently bibliographical, are used. To the review of the consulted sources, a systematic search of the terms is added: 'fake news', 'fake news + company/organization', 'corporate disinformation', 'disinformation + company/organization' (in English, Spanish and Portuguese) in the scientific databases Mendeley and Google Scholar. For the analysis, carried out between April 1, 2021 and March 31, 2022 by the undersigned researchers, a data matrix was created in Excel and the Atlas.ti software, version 21.0.8, was used. , from NK Qualitas. Finally, a total population of 239,700 files is obtained which, based on the data systematization criterion with a representative sample, represents a study corpus of n=23,970. The results show that almost 60% of the articles are indexed in the Journal Citation Report or Scopus databases, are concentrated in the areas "Information and Documentation", "Social Sciences" or "Miscellaneous" and revolve around the politics (almost 60%), “Economy” (19%), “Diseases and public health” (16%) and “Art, heritage and culture” (3%). Likewise, the most mentioned concepts are “Disinformation + fake news” (73%), “fact-checking” (13%) and “deepfakes” (8%). Interestingly, the percentages have been similar (around 2%) in the cases of the terms not searched for but found “legislation”, “media literacy” or “educommunication” and “corporate misinformation”. The conclusions show that there is disinformation whenever there is an attempt to manipulate, confuse or deceive with information of doubtful, misleading or false origin; that the concept of corporate disinformation is still to be developed; that, indeed, the dissemination of fake news affects the public perception of the organizations and that the use of artificial intelligence is revealed as an important tool for the development of new mechanisms for detecting fake news.