The words that make fake stories go viral: A corpus-based approach to analyzing Russian Covid-19 disinformation

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Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the spread of the new virus has been accompanied by the growing infodemic that became a dangerous prospect for Internet users. Social media and online messengers have been instrumental in making fake stories about Covid-19 viral. The lack of an efficient instrument for classifying digital texts as true or fake is still a big challenge. Deceptive content and its specific characteristics attract attention of many linguists, making it one of the most popular contemporary topics in corpus-based research. This paper explores the language of viral Covid-related fake stories and identifies specific linguistic features that distinguish fake stories from real (authentic) news using quantitative and qualitative approaches to text analysis. The study was conducted on the material of the self-compiled diachronic corpus containing Russian misleading coronavirus-related social media posts (a target corpus of 897 texts) which were virally shared by Russian users through social media platforms and mobile messengers from March 2020 to March 2022 and the reference corpus containing genuine materials about the virus. First, we compared two corpora using an interpretable set of features across language levels to find whether there is evidence of significant variation in the language of fake and real news. Then, we focused on frequency profiling to extract other over-represented groups of words from both corpora. Finally, we analyzed the corresponding contexts to indicate whether these features can be considered as linguistic trends in Russian Covid-related fake story making. Findings regarding the role of these over-represented groups of words in fake narratives about coronavirus revealed efficiency of frequency profiling in indicating lexical patterns of the language of deception.

作者简介

Alina Monogarova

Pyatigorsk State University

Email: alinach12@yandex.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0003-4098-0341

Assistant Professor of the English Language and Professional Communication Department at Pyatigorsk State University, Russia. Her research interests embrace corpus linguistics, text mining and text analysis, as well as standardization of developing terminologies.

Pyatigorsk, Russia

Tatyana Shiryaeva

Pyatigorsk State University

编辑信件的主要联系方式.
Email: shiryaevat@list.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0001-5508-8407

Professor of Linguistics, Head of the English Language and Professional Communication Department at Pyatigorsk State University, Russia. She is Editor-in-Chief of the research journal Professional Communication: Top Issues of Linguistics and Teaching Methods. Her research interests focus on discourse analysis, sociocognitive linguistics with particular emphasis on professional discourse studies, theory and practice of intercultural professional and business communication, English for special purposes, genre analysis and pragmatics. She is author and co-author of over 200 publications. Several research articles were published in high ranking journals, including Heliyon, Humanities and Social Sciences Reviews, International Journal of Arabic-English Studies, Journal of Language and Education, among others.

Pyatigorsk, Russia

Elena Tikhonova

MGIMO University

Email: etihonova@gmail.com
ORCID iD: 0000-0001-8252-6150

Associate Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages of MGIMO University, Moscow, Russia. She is also Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Language and Education. Her areas of interest include discourse analysis, sociocognitive linguistics, and psycholinguistics. She conducts research in the field of English for specific purposes, genre analysis, pragmatics, and academic writing. She has authored numerous articles in high-impact international journals. She is a member and lecturer of the Association of Scientific Editors and Publishers (ASEP).

Moscow, Russia

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