Multimodality and fake News: investigating the visual meanings in Facebook posts containing inaccurate news

• Autor(a) principal: Barbosa Macedo, Litiane Barbosa
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Outros Autores: de Sousa Oliveira, Isabel, Melo de Lima, Lucas
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Entrepalavras
• Texto Completo: http://www.entrepalavras.ufc.br/revista/index.php/Revista/article/view/2279
• topic: Multimodality. Fake News. Visual Meanings.; Multimodalidade. Fake News. Significados Visuais.

This investigation seeks to analyze the representative visual meanings constructed in recent posts containing fake News which were disseminated through Facebook to understand which strategies the producers of these visual modes use to legitimize such news as veritable. In order to analyze the visual meanings, we made use of the Grammar of Visual Design (GDV), proposed by Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006). Regarding the relevance of images in multimodal texts presenting fake News, we observed that the most prominent themes found in quantitative terms in the last year were Politics and Health. For this article, we present a sample of our analysis regarding the images inserted in health contexts, specifically the fake News about the new coronavirus. The results of this research show that the images play an extremely important role in the construction of the meanings of the multimodal composition of posts containing fake News. The imagery compositions analyzed are mostly photographs which were used strategically outside their original contexts. Their representative constructs, both narrative and conceptual ones, corroborate with the false information, reinforcing such misinformation. In this sense, it is urgent to plan educational actions to recognize images as social constructions not exempt from neutrality, taking into account that visual resources have historically been considered as something natural and unquestionable (KRESS; VAN LEEUWEN, 2006; MACHIN, 2012; BATEMAN, 2014).