Hoax hunters or disentanglers of disinforming narratives? Iberian fact-checking and the fight against disinformation

The recent proliferation of information disorders has drawn significant academic attention to the tools designed to counter their harmful effects, with fact-checking emerging as one of the key forms to fight disinformation. This article proposes an investigation that triangulates between quantitative and qualitative approaches to shed light on the verification activities carried out by Spanish and Portuguese fact-checkers integrated in the Iberifier hub (EFE Verifica, Maldita.es, Newtral, Poligrafo, and Verificat) –all of which abide by the IFCN standards. A series of in-depth exploratory interviews to representatives of the aforesaid fact-checking institutions were conducted at an initial stage with an aim to orient the subsequent statistical analysis of the database of verified stories published in 2022 and 2023 (N=3,697), put together by those fact-checkers following criteria and categories agreed upon by all of them. The quantitative approach was later complemented by a discourse analysis aimed at clarifying fact-checking trends and further discussing disinforming narratives in the Iberian context. The results of this investigation indicate that, while Iberian fact-checkers identify the need of transcending the debunking of individual stories through 'explainers', which aim at the overarching disinforming narratives rather than simply fact-checking specific hoaxes, their production in the last two years has focused on the latter rather than the former. As a possible way to improve that, we suggest not only an increased use of the ‘explainer’ category when debunking disinformation but also redefining such category to clarify its specific aim at the disarticulation of disinforming narratives.