Faking and Conspiring about COVID-19: A Discursive Approach

In the more general climate of post-truth - a social trend reflecting a disregard for reliable ways of knowing what is true, mostly acted through massive use of misinformation and rhetoric calling for emotions - an alarming “infodemic” accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic, affecting healthy attitudes and behaviors and further lessening trust in science, institutions, and traditional media. Its two main representative items, fake and conspiracy news, have been widely analyzed in psycho-social research, even if scholars mostly acknowledged the cognitive and social dimensions of those items and devoted less attention to their discursive construction. In addition, these works did not directly compare and differentiate fake and conspiracy pathways. In order to address this gap and promote a wider understanding of these matters, a qualitative investigation of an Italian sample of 112 fake and conspiracy news articles, mostly spread during the first two COVID-19 “waves” (from March 2020 to January 2021) was realized. Our sample gathered news specifically coming from social media posts, representing easy and fast channels for viral content diffusion. We analyzed the selected texts by means of Diatextual Analysis and Discursive Action Model models, aimed to (a) offer “in depth” fine-grained analysis of the psycholinguistic and argumentative features of fake and conspiracy news, and (b) differentiate them in line with the classical Aristotle’s rhetoric stances of logos, ethos, and pathos, thus bridging traditional and current lines of thinking. Even though they may share common roots set in the post-truth climate, fake and conspiracy news engage in different rhetoric patterns since they present different enjeu and construct specific epistemic pathways. Implications for health- and digital-literacy are debated

Blame the Opponent! Effects of Multimodal Discrediting Moves in Public Debates

In political persuasion, the persuader, besides bearing logical arguments and triggering emotions, must present one's own image (one's ethos) of a credible and reliable person, by enhancing three dimensions of it: competence, benevolence, and dominance. In a parallel way, she/he may cast discredit on the opponent by criticizing, accusing or insulting, on the same three dimensions. The work provides a description and a typology of multimodal discrediting moves focusing on the discrediter's multimodal behavior. Based on an Italian corpus of political debates, the analysis points out which facial expressions, gaze behavior, gestures, postures, and prosodic features are used to convey discredit concerning the three target features of competence, benevolence, and dominance. Finally, an experimental study is presented assessing the effects of the different types of discrediting moves on potential electors. Results show that casting discredit on the other's competence while also performing gestures, and casting discredit on the other's dominance without gesturing, makes arguments more shareable and convincing. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC