Political Manipulation In Online Media: An Experimental Study

Abstract

The results of a study performed at the interface of linguistics, linguopragmatics, theory of ordinary language consciousness, Internet linguistics, stylistics and the theory of the text are presented in the article. The strategies and tactics of political manipulation in the mass media both from the perspective of the addressant who has created the original text, as well as from the recipient's point of view, who reacts to the manipulative techniques implemented in the news are investigated. The fact that readers perceive the same text, which contains the same manipulative techniques, in different ways is of great interest, and inevitably confirms their effectiveness. The conducted research made it possible to reveal the fact that the author chooses a strategy for manipulating the mass consciousness of the reader, but implements it using different tactics: personification, "grey world", overthrow and concealment, which is confirmed by the linguostylistic analysis of the original text. The evidence that the majority of readers were exposed to manipulation is shown in the interpretation of the results of the experiment. The response of recipients to the transformed text was different from the comments on the original news: for example, the comments received during the experiment were more diverse, this is due to the fact that in the absence of manipulative techniques, recipients had to develop their own reaction based on pre-text attitudes and facts obtained from the news.