Abstract
While online disinformation practices have grown exponentially over the past decade, the COVID-19 pandemic provides arguably the best opportunity to date to study such communications at a cross-national level. Using the data provided by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), we examine the strategic uses of non-verbal and verbal arguments to push disinformation through social media and websites during the first wave of lockdowns in 2020 across 16 European countries. Our paper extends the work by Brennen et al. (2021) on the use of visuals in COVID-19 misinformation claims by investigating the use of facial emotional expressions and body pose depictions in conjunction with framing elements such as problems identified and attribution of responsibility in the construction of disinformation messages. Our European-wide comparative analysis of 174 messages indexed by the IFCN during the months of April and May 2020 helps provide a rounder understanding of the use of non-verbal devices in advancing COVID-19 disinformation across the continent, and can provide the basis for a framework for further study of the strategic use of non-verbal devices in COVID-19 disinformation world-wide.
Highlights
Disinformation and the ease of its dissemination through social media, are among the most significant global challenges today
This study focuses on the contribution of non-verbal displays to the design of disinformation messages, by examining the patterns of association between, on the one hand, depictions of positive and negative facial emotional displays and contractive and expansive body poses, and framing elements in the disinformation posts—topics, the problems identified and the attribution of blame—on the other hand
An interesting result is that facial positive emotional displays are, perhaps unexpectedly, associated with vaccines, and with blaming well-identified individuals with decision-making power, such as politicians and businesspeople; they are weakly associated with mentions of “death” as a problem—all three framing components carrying a strongly negative charge
Summary
Disinformation and the ease of its dissemination through social media, are among the most significant global challenges today. This study focuses on the contribution of non-verbal displays to the design of disinformation messages, by examining the patterns of association between, on the one hand, depictions of positive and negative facial emotional displays and contractive and expansive body poses, and framing elements in the disinformation posts—topics, the problems identified and the attribution of blame—on the other hand. We examine the association between these non-verbal displays and the type of individuals pictured in the posts, whether human exemplars, standing for ordinary people, or the rich and powerful—such as politicians, businesspeople, and experts. We make use of the database of COVID-19 disinformation messages put together by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at the Poynter Institute to examine
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