Las fake news sobre el COVID-19: ¿qué aprendemos de ellas?

The health crisis produced by COVID-19 has generated a heightened need of information as a response to a situation of uncertainty and high emotional load, in which fake news as other informative contents have grown dramatically. The aim of this work is to learn how to know and filter fake news without resorting to predefined guidelines or information authorities, by analyzing the fake news recorded in Spain during the health crisis of COVID-19. The sample of 92 fakes was collected from the Maldita.es website and analyzed according to criteria of cognitive and affective authority, interactivity, themes and potential danger. The results point to a practical absence of indicators of cognitive authority, while the affective authority of these news items is built through mechanisms of discrediting people, ideas or movement, and the use of offensive or rude language. The dominant theme is politics (39%), followed by those related to society (33%) and science (24.4). Finally, fake news, for the most part, do not seem to pose any danger to the health or safety of people, pointing out that the harm they cause is moral. We conclude by highlighting the importance of a culture of civic values ​​to combat fake news