for free speech within content moderation,
including the obligation to notify users when
their content is acted on, and providing them with
appeal opportunities. However, the parameters are
not clear, and the wording may lead to confusion—
there are a few exceptions, there is a broad “right
of reply” to be granted by platforms in the case of
“offenses,” and there are other unclear obligations
for social networks.
On the other hand, the bill has some
positive aspects. It introduces new transparency
requirements for platforms, compelling them
to regularly publish reports containing metrics
regarding content moderation, including the
number of pieces of content that the platform
has acted on, the number of profiles suspended
or erased, the number of user reports, and so on.
Moreover, it also requires platforms to present
more data on ads, especially political advertising.
As a result of steady advocacy from civil society
against the provisions in the previous versions of
the bill, which had the potential to lead to content
filtering, these conditions were excluded from the
current version, giving space to rules dedicated
to tackling abusive and inauthentic behavior
such as malicious bots and bulk messaging. We
consider this a positive shift, especially because
user criminalization or general mandates to filter
content have been ruled out.
7. CHILE
7.1 THE DISINFORMATION
SCENARIO IN THE COUNTRY
The Chilean media market follows the Latin
American
pattern
of
concentration
and
centralization in the form of large business groups
based in the main metropolitan regions, especially
the capital, Santiago. The Mercúrio Group controls
the country’s two main newspapers, El Mercúrio
and Las Últimas Noticias, in addition to more than
twenty regional newspapers and radio stations such
as Universo and Positiva FM. Another conglomerate
is the Copesa Group, which controls print media
such as La Tercera and La Hora and websites such as
La Cuarta, and which has published many magazine
titles in the last decade. It also has associated itself
with radio stations such as Duna and Zero. The
Luksic Group is active in several areas, including
media and telecommunications. It controls the TV
channel Canal 13 and radio stations such as Oasis,
Sonar, and Play. The Bethia Group has a similar
profile, with subsidiaries in different sectors,
I N FO R M ATI O N D I SO R D ER IN THE GLOBA L SOUTH
including TV channels (ETC TV) and radio stations
(Carolina, Infinita, Romântica, and Tiempo).
The country went through a process of
intense political protests in 2019 and 2020, which
resulted in a new constituent process, held in 2021.
According to the “Digital News Report 2020”
(Reuters Institute 2020), in that year Chile saw a 15
percent drop in trust in the news, reaching a point
at which only 33 percent of respondents expressed
belief in the news. Among the forty countries
analyzed, Chile was ranked twenty-eighth in terms
of the proportion of the population that trusts the
news (Reuters Institute 2020). Among the reasons
for this low level of trust in the media is the view
of media vehicles as being linked to economic
elites and criticism of the coverage of the protests,
pointing to a lack of representativeness.
A report by the Observatório do Direito à Comunicação (the Right to Communication Observatory)
and Fundación Datos Protegidos (Protected Data
Foundation) about freedom of expression in the
country in 2020 noted several problems in media
coverage of the protests, which led to citizens accusing the media of spreading disinformation and
manipulation (García, Baeza, and Peña 2021). This
illustrates a trend in Latin America, where disinformation practices are not restricted to social media
but have long been discerned in the work of the
so-called traditional media.
A study conducted by researchers at the Pontifical
Catholic University of Chile (Pontificia Universidad
de Chile) and published in an international journal
in 2019 (Valenzuela et al. 2019) pointed out high
levels of perceived exposure to false content
among respondents. More than 75 percent of
the sample said they had received some of the
messages used as examples in the survey, including
content concerning fires and the supposed risks of
vaccines. Among the 75 percent mentioned above,
24 percent found claims that vaccines can cause
autism to be very or extremely credible.
According to a regional study prepared by the
information security company Kaspersky and
released in 2020, 70 percent of Chileans could not
tell the difference between false and true news.
In this respect the country ranked third among
the nations evaluated, behind Colombia and Peru.
Latin America and the Caribbean – 1 01