University of Alicante’s Torrevieja campus hosted a discussion on fake news and media literacy.
On April 30, to mark World Press Freedom Day, the University of Alicante’s Torrevieja campus, together with the City Council and Torrevieja’s Cultural Society Casino, organized a debate featuring journalists and a university expert on fake news research.
Participants included professional journalists from leading local media outlets and Raúl Rodríguez-Ferrándiz, author of Disinformation and Power: The Alchemy of Persuasion. The discussion highlighted the importance of fact-checking, promoting media literacy among young people and professionals, and countering the dangers of information overload, disinformation, and false news.
Rodríguez-Ferrándiz, a professor of Mass Communication Semiotics at the University of Alicante, has specialized in post-truth politics, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news since 2016. He has received multiple awards and contributed to major cultural journals and the Información newspaper’s “Arte y Letras” supplement.
Moderated by Jesús Mula, journalist and professor at UMH, the panel also featured Esther Sánchez (Onda Cero), Melania Sala (Televisión Torrevieja), and Rafa Ballester (Torrevieja Radio). Through their questions, they explored the book’s themes and debated current and future challenges in journalism.
The book examines topics such as Trumpism, Cambridge Analytica, computational propaganda, Pizzagate, WikiLeaks, online content moderation, and conspiracy theories from the pandemic to climate change denial. It analyzes how disinformation spreads in the digital era, fueled by polarization, rumors, and viral lies.
