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The editorial "Democracy under siege: how actors, communication strategies, and emerging phenomena are changing the rules in the public sphere" explores the challenges democracy faces in the digital age. It discusses the rise of populism, manipulation of emotions, spread of disinformation, and control of communication in non-democratic regions. The articles featured in this research topic shed light on the evolving dynamics in the public sphere and the implications for democratic governance, emphasizing the need for a nuanced approach to regulating digital media and a renewed commitment to democratic norms and values. [Extracted from the article]

The aim of this research is to analyse the electoral misinformation circulating in the public space as a whole during campaign periods. The sample is made up of 481 rebuttals published by the verification media Maldita.es, Newtral, Efe Verifica and Verificat in relation to 409 pieces of misinformation during the six campaigns carried out in Spain during the political cycle that began in the general election in November 2019, which also includes the regional elections held in Galicia, the Basque Country, Catalonia, Madrid, Castilla y León, and Andalusia. The methodology consists of a content analysis of 13 variables articulated around five dimensions of study: scope of generation and/or dissemination, format, epistemological authority, prominence, theme, and discourse. The results show: (1) the predominance of the citizen space of social networks as a field for the generation and distribution of electoral misinformation; (2) the crude construction of misinformation, with a preponderance of text as a misinformation element accompanied by multimedia resources shared without alteration; (3) the pre-eminence of problematic materials disseminated anonymously and without citing sources and those actually distributed by the political class, especially the right wing; (4) the majority role of the political class, particularly the left, generally characterised in a negative manner, although the political class of the right receives a greater proportion of positive treatment; (5) the abundance of sectoral and ideological themes, with a prominent presence of attacking elites as the predominant populist discursive feature; and (6) the profusion of direct attacks on political rivals, especially related to ideological and management issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The mediatisation model in politics assumes that media conveys political messages between parties and citizenship, with the risk of promoting issues that frame the electoral content in terms of competition. These dynamics could distract from the debate of ideas and political policies. However, digital media like Twitter provide direct communication channels between parties, candidates and users. The present research explores Twitter content during an electoral campaign focused on the four issues proposed by Patterson (1980) to assess mediatisation: political, policy, campaign and personal (regarding the candidate). The goal of this research study is to evaluate the degree of mediatisation on Twitter using this typology. The research also evaluates the influence of the issue on retweet volume. The study's basis was a 15.8 million-tweet corpus obtained during the 2015 Spanish General Election pre-campaign and campaign. This dataset was analysed using an automatic classification system. The results highlighted a predominance of policy issues during both the pre-campaign and campaign, except for the two televised debates, during which campaign issues were the most prevalent. On the election night, users commented much more on political issues. Finally, the kind of issue most likely to be retweeted was policy issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Mediatization of politics reaches its maximum expression with electoral campaigns, in which political actors strive to launch their persuasive messages to the public, in order to reach and, ultimately, convince the voters. This article aims to analyze the political discourse in the electoral debates televised during the 2015 Spanish Presidential Elections. The objective of the analysis is to observe which topics stood out during the political actors' interventions and to determine if mediatization affects the content of the electoral debates, or if, on the contrary, these spaces remain as forums for the detailed discussion of various public policy issues. For this purpose, we propose an analysis of content based on seventy categories of analysis, grouped in four blocks: policy issues, political issues, campaign issues and personal issues. The results clearly indicate that sectoral policy matters control the political discourse; therefore, electoral debates, despite the reach of mediatization, still constitute spaces for detailed exposition and the confrontation of public policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]