Fake news on health: an analysis of linguistic marks in the news “Banana with HIV virus”

Abstract

In this paper, we reflect on fake news in the digital realm, more specifically, on the news “Banana with HIV virus”, which has been shared on the social network Facebook and had repercussions on the Internet. The objective of this study is to analyze the categories of the Discourse Organization Modes present in the news “Banana with HIV virus”. More specifically: to identify the categories of the Discourse Mode in the news; and investigate the Discourse Organization Mode. For this, we have the following guiding question: how do the Discourse Organization Modes of the genre fake post corroborate for the direct interpellation of the interlocutor? In order to answer this question, we enlist the reflections of Charaudeau (2006, 2013, 2014) and Paveau (2013, 2015) to address the fake news from a discursive point of view. Regarding the rising wave of disinformation in the digital ecosystem, we draw to Levy (2016), Primo (2012), and Barrera (2019). As a methodological procedure, we used bibliographic research coupled with the qualitative method to analyze the corpus. Finally, we concluded that the absence of the Discourse Organization Mode (descriptive) is a crucial factor for the target subject (interlocutor/reader) to question the veracity of the conveyed news, since the sources that support it will be absent, thus preventing them from sharing fake news in digital social medias such as Facebook, especially regarding the collective health.