Discourse Strategies of Fake News in the Anti-vax Campaign

Abstract

Anti-vaccine controversial debates have been occurring for more than a century. As the debate has moved onto social media, the issue has further developed. For anti-vaccine campaigners the use of Twitter and Facebook means giving them voice and massively amplifying their message. Yet, precisely because social media advertisements and news works on the basis of an algorithm that brings people to see similar news to those they have read before, anti-vax supporters tend to read and to always believe in the same type of news, be it fake or real. In other words, anti-vax supporters cannot discern real and fake news, as they do not realize that scientific fake news is the result of a decontextualization of the medical sources. By drawing on CDA, corpus linguistics and socio-semiotic multimodality, this paper aims at analyzing fake news discursive dynamics and strategies related to the anti-vax campaign to unveil cognitive, social and institutional constructs of misinformation.

Keywords

• anti-vaccine movement
• autism
• discourse strategies
• fake news
• medical discourse
• multimodality
• popularization
• social media
• sociosemiotic analysis
• vaccine