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Accepted Paper:
How fake news become stories: the case of an earthquake amidst pandemic
Tanja Bukovcan
(University of Zagreb)
At 6:24 AM on March 22, 2020, a strong earthquake hit Zagreb, completely locked down due to COVID-19. With no official instructions on what to do, fake news became true stories. This paper tries to determine reasoning and narrative strategies of the people experiencing the two parallel disasters.
Paper long abstract:
At 6:24 AM on Sunday, March 22, 2020 a strong earthquake, 5.5 in magnitude on the Richter’s scale, hit the Zagreb city centre. At that moment, Zagreb and Croatia were in almost complete lockdown due to COVID-19 pandemic. In the minutes that followed the earthquake, the official, confidential information not only as to what happened, but more urgently as to that to do, was completely missing. In the absence of official instructions, a shocking piece of misinformation (Krause et al 2020), - that the second, much bigger quake is surely coming – which was shared and quickly spread through social media, was accepted by many as a coherent and trustworthy standard and made people act upon it. As an example of a rapid ethnography, this paper tries to determine the pathways of normative, narrative and moral reasoning (Mattingly 1991, Garro and Mattingly 2001), on the side of the people experiencing the two parallel disasters through which a piece of fake news became a story.