Alena Kluknavská

Alena Kluknavská is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Social Studies at Masaryk University. Her research focuses on political communication and mediated public discourses on migration and minority issues. She has also been interested in understanding the communication strategies and successes of the populist radical right parties and movements in Central and Eastern Europe. Recently, her work has focused on truth contestation, post-truth, and polarization in political elite discourses, particularly on social media.

Abstract

In recent years, the spread of online disinformation has been considered a major challenge for democratic societies. Building upon the framework introduced by Humprecht, Esser, and Van Aelst (2020), we examine the circumstances which influence people’s resilience to intentionally shared false information. Trying to understand the diffusion and consumption of disinformation in the Czech Republic, especially in the environment of social media, we look at political (e.g., polarization and populism) and discursive (e.g., media trust) opportunities which affect whether the people are willing to like, comment, and share disinformation or whether they disregard and ignore such messages.