It’s gone viral: a linguistic-pragmatic analysis of Fake News about the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil

• Autor(a) principal: Gonçalves Leal, Fernanda
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Signo (Santa Cruz do Sul. Online)
• Texto Completo: https://online.unisc.br/seer/index.php/signo/article/view/17590
• topic: Fake News; Pragmática; Pandemia de COVID-19; Brasil; Fake News; Pragmatics; COVID-19 pandemic; Brazil

The coronavirus pandemic is an unexpected and unknown danger which all countries had to face. This situation was worsened in Brazil by the significant amount of fake news spread about the disease, with disinformation reaching high rates during this period. Thereby, this paper analyzes fake news about the pandemic in Brazil from the pragmatic perspective of Peirce and Grice. These authors contribute with their concepts of habit, creed, implicatures and conversational maxims, respectively. This article also presents a description of fake news in Wardle, and explores the conception of post-truth in D’Ancona. The main aim of the research was to reflect on the connection between such ideas and the convincing aspect of fake news about the pandemic. Bibliographic research and textual analysis, within a qualitative approach, were the methodologies used. The corpus was composed of four fake news collected at Agência Lupa (a Brazilian fact-checking agency) and shared via Whatsapp. Results showed that fake news tend to impact those who have a pre-disposition to believe its content, and that the implicatures and conversational maxims are used to deceive the reader’s understanding, misleading them to false conclusions and ideas.