Implicit pragmatic phenomena in Hungarian health-related real and fake news headlines: a corpus-based comparative analysis
On digital platforms, spreading of fake news is approximately ten times quicker than that of real news (Krekó 2021), causing serious harm in various areas (e.g. health, democracy, gender equality, and security) (UN 2023). The number of clicks on headlines influences their spread. Although having a clickbait headline is not a definitive criterion of fake news, it is reasonable to assume that the proportion of clickbait headlines is higher in fake news than in real news. Analysing clickbait headlines, Scott (2021) focuses on overt linguistic elements that often create an information gap triggering clicks on headlines.
Fake news headlines frequently include implicit pragmatic phenomena, which, not having explicit forms, are challenging to identify. The present paper has two aims. First, to examine implicit arguments, speech acts with implicit contents, and implicatures in both types of headlines; second, to compare their use and the underlying strategies. The research is based on our MedCollect corpus consisting of 630 Hungarian fake news texts (383,908 token) and 748 real ones (388,212 token) on health issues. The main results are as follows. (1) While real news headlines seem to be more informative, fake news headlines often create a wider information gap by using implicit pragmatic contents and various manipulative strategies (e.g. referring to an authority, generating unfounded expectations, evoking fear). (2) In contrast to the occurrences in real news headlines, implicit arguments in fake news headlines cannot always be resolved in the article; they only serve to generate clicks. (3) In fake news headlines, implicit contents in speech acts tend to trigger emotions and psychological effects to generate clicks. (4) The unfair use of implicatures only occurs in fake news headlines in order to avoid responsibility. Our results may contribute to the differentiation between fake and real news.
References
Krekó, P. (2021). Tömegparanoia 2. Összesküvés-elméletek, álhírek és dezinformáció [Massparanoia 2. Conspiracy theories, fake news, and disinformation]. Budapest: Athenaeum.
Scott, K. (2021). You won’t believe what’s in this paper! Clickbait, relevance and the curiosity gap. Journal of Pragmatics, 175, 53-66.
UN (2023). United Nations. Our Common Agenda Policy Brief 8. Information Integrity on Digital Platforms. June 2023. https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/our-common-agenda-policy-brief-information-integrity-en.pdf (Accessed 10. 11. 2023).