The Pragmatics of Political Deception on Facebook

Olajimbiti, Ezekiel Opeyemi

doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-8535-0.ch017

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Studies in fake news in Nigeria cut across examining challenges in curtailing the spread of misinformation and disinformation in social media during elections (Assay, 2019) and pragmatic use of Facebook as a propaganda to deceive electorates (Olajimbiti, 2019). While Olajimbiti (2019) identifies four political deceptive forms on Facebook to include equivocation of identity, exaggeration of performance, falsification of corruption cases, and concealment of offences, Assay (2019) advocates strengthening national campaign against fake news to checkmate falsehood and half-truth. This study aims at examining discursive strategies used to justify falsehood in selected fake news items sampled from WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter during the 2019 Nigerian general elections.…”

Section: Fake News Social Media and Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Fake news comprises fabricated information geared towards legitimating falsehood to achieve political gains. Studies in fake news in Nigeria cut across examining challenges in curtailing the spread of misinformation and disinformation in social media during elections (Assay, 2019) and pragmatic use of Facebook as a propaganda to deceive electorates (Olajimbiti, 2019). While Olajimbiti (2019) identifies four political deceptive forms on Facebook to include equivocation of identity, exaggeration of performance, falsification of corruption cases, and concealment of offences, Assay (2019) advocates strengthening national campaign against fake news to checkmate falsehood and halftruth.…”

Section: Fake News Social Media and Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Legitimating falsehood in social media: A discourse analysis of political fake news

Igwebuike

Chimuanya

2020

Discourse & Communication

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Digital peddling of fake news is influential to persuasive political participation, with veritable social media platforms. Social media, with their instantaneous and widespread usage, have been exploited by ‘anonymous’ political influencers who fabricate and inundate internet community with unverified and false information. Using van Leeuwen’s Discourse Legitimation approach and insights from Discourse Analysis, this study analyses 120 purposively sampled fake news posts on Whatsapp, Facebook and Twitter, shared during the 2019 general elections in Nigeria. WhatsApp allows for the easy and fast sharing of fake news as it pulled the largest occurrence of legitimation strategies, followed by Facebook. Authorisation is the highest occurring legitimation strategy at 46.6% frequency; this is followed by Moralisation which has 27% and Rationalisation at 26.4%; while Mythopoesis did not feature at all in the sampled data, leaving it at 0%. In particular, expert and role model authority are most often deployed to validate fake news such as the demise and cloning of President Buhari, ruling party’s plan to rig and destabilise the 2019 election, massive corruption in the current administration and imminent ethnic violence. The study argues that these strategies are viable persuasive tools owing to their use of discourse markers like make-believe images, emotive language, appeal to emotions, rational conclusions, hateful comments, verbal indictment and coercive verbs.

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Section: Fake News Social Media and Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Fake News Social Media and Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Legitimating falsehood in social media: A discourse analysis of political fake news

Igwebuike

Chimuanya

2020

Discourse & Communication

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“…Al-Zawawy concluded that such models lack contextsensitivity and are therefore limited in determining whether a discourse is deceptive or nondeceptive. Olajimbiti (2019) surveyed the political deception in 250 sampled political posts on Facebook out of which 50 posts are selected as the most politically deceptive at the time of the Nigerian 2019 general elections. The posts were found to achieve other-criticism, positive selfpresentation, and mobilized the public, yet they fell short of addressing the ideology-laden motivations according to which politicians (re)act.…”

Section: Previous Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deception Strategies in the Discourse of American Think Tanks: An Argumentative- Pragmatic Analysis

Al-juboori¹,

Mustafa²

2022

AWEJ

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Deception is a misrepresentation of reality that attracted many researchers examining it from various perspectives. However, no due attention has been given to the discursive deception strategies in the work of think tanks. This study aims at exposing the deception strategies deployed in the conservative American think tanks’ discourse which concern itself with the (re)production of socio-political realities. The study holds the significance of the detection and explication of argumentative and pragmatic discursive deception strategies which impose ideological hegemony and socio-political polarization of the positively presented Self against the negatively presented Other. This study attempts to answer a twofold question: what are the discursive deception strategies involved in the work of think tanks, and why/how these strategies are applied? To this end, eight political texts from three think tanks were analyzed adopting an eclectic model based on van Dijk (2000) and Yule (1996). The analyzed data mainly focuses on four political themes namely (1) terrorism in Islam, (2) Russian role in the Middle East, (3) the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, (4) the U.S. policy in the Middle East. The results demonstrate the pervasiveness of discursive deception strategies in the think tanks’ discourse which endeavor to communicate an ideological polarization of a positive presentation of the Self against a negative presentation of the Other and reinforce a hegemony of particular socio-political realities. Findings can be beneficial for students of (critical) discourse analysis, media, communications studies, and English for special purposes

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Contexts and pragmatic strategies of COVID-19 related cartoons in Nigeria

Olajimbiti,

Jolaoso

2024

Language and Semiotic Studies

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The global outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic has been experienced differently by people depending on their socio-cultural contexts. These varied experiences are expressed in various forms of communication, including cartoons. This paper examines the pragmatic resources inherent in COVID-19-related cartoons depicting the impact of the virus on Nigerian society. Forty COVID-19-related cartoons, circulated on social media, were collected on Twitter and WhatsApp platforms between March and April 2020 as data. Multimodality and presupposition served as theoretical framework and descriptive research design was adopted. Findings reveal five socio-contextual domains, religion, health, economy, politics and governance nd family, characterizing the social experiences of Nigerians during the pandemic. Through the evocation of situational reality, pragmatic sarcasm, punning, and orientation to government insensitivity, the cartoonists evoke pragmatic functions of informing and warning about social behaviours in the religion, family and health domains; recreating situational realities on socioeconomic impacts in the domain of economy; and satirizing government policies and mocking politicians’ insincerity in the domain of politics and governance on sociopolitical experiences of Nigerians before and during the pandemic. The study concludes cartoons are a strong means of portraying societal realities and people’s experiences comically and graphically.

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The Pragmatics of Political Deception on Facebook

Cited by 3 publications

References 9 publications

Legitimating falsehood in social media: A discourse analysis of political fake news

Legitimating falsehood in social media: A discourse analysis of political fake news

Deception Strategies in the Discourse of American Think Tanks: An Argumentative- Pragmatic Analysis

Contexts and pragmatic strategies of COVID-19 related cartoons in Nigeria

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