The interaction of persuasive and pragmatic strategies in fake news on English-language social media, news, and blogs (pilot study)


https://doi.org/10.28995/2686-7249-2025-3-210-226

Full Text:




Abstract

The aim of the pilot study is to investigate persuasive methods in fake news, with a particular focus on their basic taxonomy and identification of the pragmatic mechanisms, such as conversational implicatures, which operate in examples with a persuasive character. A preliminary analysis of English-language social media and English-language blogs and news shows the use of similar techniques of persuasiveness, with a significantly higher occurrence of emotionally charged language in social media. Possibly, the differences in usage stem from the characteristics of the analyzed genres. Our qualitative analysis shows that there is a certain correlation between flouting the Maxim of Quantity and the techniques of Appeal to popularity, values, authority, Attack on reputation (all subcategories except name-calling), as well as Manipulative formulations (exaggerations).


About the Author

R. Trnavac
HSE University
Russian Federation

Radoslava Trnavac - PhD, HSE University.

21/4, Staraya Basmannaya St., Moscow, 105066



References

1. Apresjan, V. and Orlov, A. (2022), “Pragmatic mechanisms of manipulation in Russian online media. How clickbait works (or does not)”, Journal of Pragmatics, no. 195, pp. 91–108.

2. Asr, F.T. and Taboada, M. (2019), “Big Data and quality data for fake news and misinformation detection”, Big Data & Society, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 1–14.

3. Conroy, N.K., Rubin, V.L. and Chen, Y. (2015), “Automatic deception detection. Methods for finding fakenews”, ASIST Proceedings, vol. 52, no. 1, pp. 1–4.

4. Da San Martino, G., Yu, S., Barron-Cedeno, A., Petrov, R. and Nakov, P. (2019), “Fine-grained analysis of propaganda in news articles”, in Inui, K., Jiang, J., Ng, V. and Wan, X., eds., Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLPIJCNLP), Association for Computational Linguistics, Hong Kong, China, pp. 5636–5646.

5. Grieve, J. and Woodfield, H. (2023), The language of fake news (elements in forensic linguistics), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

6. Li, H., Dunn, J. and Nini, A. (2022), “Register variation remains stable across 60 languages”, Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 397–426.

7. Põldvere, N., Uddin, Z. and Thomas, A. (2023), “The PolitiFact-Oslo corpus. A new dataset for fake news analysis and detection”, Information, vol. 14, no. 12, pp. 1–32.

8. Potthast, M., Kiesel, J., Reinartz, K., Bevendorff, J. and Stein, B. (2018), “A stylometric inquiry into hyperpartisan and fake news”, ACL Proceedings, no. 1, pp. 231–240.

9. Rashkin, H., Choi, E., Jang, J. Y., Volkova, S. and Choi, Y. (2017), “Truth of varying shades. Analyzing language in fake news and political fact-checking”, EMNLP Proceedings, Copenhagen, Denmark, pp. 2931–2937.

10. Reboul, A. (2021), “Truthfully misleading: truth, informativity, and manipulation in linguistic communication”, Frontiers in Communication, vol. 6, DOI: 10.3389/fcomm.2021.646820.

11. Sousa-Silva, R. (2022), “Fighting the fake. A forensic linguistic analysis to fake news detection”, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, no. 35, pp. 2409–2433.

12. Tandoc, E.C., Lim, W.Z. and Ling, R. (2017), “Defining fake news”, Digital Journalism, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 147–153. Torok, R. (2015), “Symbiotic radicalisation strategies: Propaganda tools and neuro linguistic programming”, in

13. Proceedings of the Australian Security and Intelligence Conference, Perth, Australia, pp. 58–65.

14. Trnavac, R. and Poldvere, N. (2024), “Investigating appraisal and the language of evaluation in fake news corpora”, Corpus Pragmatics, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 107–130.

15. Volkova, S., Shaffer, K., Jang, J.Y. and Hodas, N. (2017), “Separating facts from fiction. Linguistic models to classify suspicious and trusted news posts on Twitter*”, ACL Proceedings, no. 2, pp. 647–653.

16. Weston, A. (2018), A rulebook for arguments, Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis, USA.


Supplementary files

For citation: Trnavac R. The interaction of persuasive and pragmatic strategies in fake news on English-language social media, news, and blogs (pilot study). RSUH/RGGU Bulletin: “Literary Teory. Linguistics. Cultural Studies”, Series. 2025;(3):210-226. https://doi.org/10.28995/2686-7249-2025-3-210-226

Views: 10

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.


ISSN 2073-6355 (Print)