Sousa-Silva Rui
Faculty of Arts and Humanities, CLUP - Centre for Linguistics of the University of Porto, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal.
Faculdade de Letras, Universidade do Porto, Via Panorâmica, s/n, 4150-564 Porto, Portugal.
Int J Semiot Law. 2022;35(6):2409-2433. doi: 10.1007/s11196-022-09901-w. Epub 2022 Apr 28.
Fake news has been the focus of debate, especially since the election of Donald Trump (2016), and remains a topic of concern in democratic countries worldwide, given (a) their threat to democratic systems and (b) the difficulty in detecting them. Despite the deployment of sophisticated computational systems to identify fake news, as well as the streamlining of fact-checking methods, appropriate fake news detection mechanisms have not yet been found. In fact, technological approaches are likely to be inefficient, given that fake news are based mostly on partisanship and identity politics, and not necessarily on outright deception. However, as disinformation is inherently expressed linguistically, this is a privileged room for forensic linguistic analysis. This article builds upon a forensic linguistic analysis of fake news pieces published in English and in Portuguese, which were collected since 2019 from acknowledged fake news outlets. The preliminary empirical analysis reveals that fake news pieces employ particular linguistic features, e.g. at the levels of typography, orthography and spelling, and morphosyntax. The systematic identification of these features, which will allow mapping linguistic resources and patterns used in those contexts, contributes to scholarship, not only by enabling a streamlined development of computational detection systems, but more importantly by permitting the forensic linguistics expert to assist criminal investigations and give evidence in court.
假新闻一直是辩论的焦点，尤其是自唐纳德·特朗普当选（2016年）以来，并且鉴于（a）其对民主制度的威胁以及（b）检测它们的困难，在全球民主国家中仍然是一个令人担忧的话题。尽管部署了复杂的计算系统来识别假新闻，以及简化了事实核查方法，但尚未找到合适的假新闻检测机制。事实上，技术方法可能效率低下，因为假新闻大多基于党派偏见和身份政治，而不一定基于彻头彻尾的欺骗。然而，由于虚假信息本质上是通过语言表达的，这是法医语言学分析的一个特权领域。本文基于对自2019年以来从公认的假新闻媒体收集的英文和葡萄牙文假新闻文章的法医语言学分析。初步实证分析表明，假新闻文章采用了特定的语言特征，例如在排版、正字法和拼写以及形态句法层面。对这些特征的系统识别，将有助于绘制在这些语境中使用的语言资源和模式，这不仅有助于简化计算检测系统的开发，更重要的是，使法医语言学专家能够协助刑事调查并在法庭上提供证据，从而对学术研究做出贡献。
