Pilot study explores emotional language use in fake news on social media compared to news and blogs, suggesting genre influences.
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).
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Radoslava Trnavac (2025) studied this question.
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