The Discourse of Fake News in Italy A Comparative Analysis

Abstract

While the ongoing debate over post-truth focuses predominantly on finding procedures to reveal false statements, distinguishing facts (truth) from fake news (false), promoting fact-checking and debunking on an ever broader scale, the semiotic perspective may choose to speculate on the benefits of analysing the texts which actually create and spread fake news, in order to acknowledge the main discursive and narrative strategies used by those most responsible for spreading hoaxes, and better understand the way they produce their own credibility and use it in order to pollute public debate. Reconstructing the rhetorical dimension of the "mud-slinging machine" may prove particularly useful, as it produces typologies that can be easily recognised over thousands of similar cases. My contribution shows the results of an enquiry into a number of Italian Facebook pages, proposing relevant typologies-based mainly on generative models and Landowski's works on politics-that claim to be general and fully applicable to a wider corpus.