A construção persuasiva das fake news sobre COVID-19 em uma perspectiva semiótica

Abstract

The present study aims to analyze the persuasion strategies mobilized to build the truth effects of sense in fake news about COVID-19 treatment and prevention. In fake news, the strength of the intersubjective relationship between the subjects of the enunciative scene (enunciator/sender and enunciatee/receiver) is essential to its persuasion. The challenge, however, is to understand which mechanisms of discourse guarantee the establishment of certain effects of sense that build, with coherence, an effective persuasion in these fake news. For this, we opted to undertake this study from the perspective of the discursive semiotics proposed by Greimas (1975; 2014). In addition to considering the problematic of fake news and its implications in contemporary times (Gugoni, 2021; Seixas, 2019; De Souza, 2022), we present a proposal for a semiotic approach to the phenomenon (Barros, 2019; 2020), in which we discuss, in particular, the concepts of persuasion (Greimas, 2014; Greimas; Courtés, 2008; Landowski, 2017; Gomes; Mancini, 2007; Torres, 2016), enunciation and the marks of enunciation in the utterance (Fiorin, 2016; 2021). With this framework, we delved into a corpus composed of six texts. From the analysis of each piece of disinformation, we were able to observe different strategies of sense construction mobilized by the instance of enunciation, marked by the oscillation between a greater subjectivity (close to the subject) and a greater objectivity (distant to the subject). These strategies were reinforced from the figurative covering that installs the opposition between the familiar (of the "we") vs. the distant (of the "they"), the polemic-contractual relationship with scientific discourse and the construction of an effect of conspiracy in the strategy of truthfulness by secrecy, as effective means of persuasion. In a broad perspective, the investigation points to a generalizing aspect of fake news, which in their persuasive exercise build a transposition of the doing of the utterance (making know) to the doing of the enunciation (making do). There is, thus, a global enunciator of fake news that manipulates by seduction its enunciatee, with a view to the possibility of building a positive image of the latter as a co-enunciator from the wanting-to-do that is installed: sharing.