Legitimating Falsehood in Social Media: A Discourse Analysis of Political Fake News
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Sage Publications
Abstract
Description
Digital peddling of fake news is influential to persuasive political participation, with veritable
social media platforms. Social media, with their instantaneous and widespread usage, have been
exploited by ‘anonymous’ political influencers who fabricate and inundate internet community
with unverified and false information. Using van Leeuwen’s Discourse Legitimation approach and
insights from Discourse Analysis, this study analyses 120 purposively sampled fake news posts
on Whatsapp, Facebook and Twitter, shared during the 2019 general elections in Nigeria.
WhatsApp allows for the easy and fast sharing of fake news as it pulled the largest occurrence of
legitimation strategies, followed by Facebook. Authorisation is the highest occurring legitimation
strategy at 46.6% frequency; this is followed by Moralisation which has 27% and Rationalisation
at 26.4%; while Mythopoesis did not feature at all in the sampled data, leaving it at 0%. In
particular, expert and role model authority are most often deployed to validate fake news such as
the demise and cloning of President Buhari, ruling party’s plan to rig and destabilise the 2019 election, massive corruption in the current administration and imminent ethnic violence. The study
argues that these strategies are viable persuasive tools owing to their use of discourse markers like
make-believe images, emotive language, appeal to emotions, rational conclusions, hateful
comments, verbal indictment and coercive verbs.
Keywords
PE English, PR English literature