27/10/2026
The Media Linguistics Centre invites you to a guest lecture/ workshop!
Join us for a guest lecture/workshop "Fake News or ‘just’ Satire? Crucial differences in text types may help to identify the former" by Dr Michael Pace-Sigge from University of Eastern Finland, Finland.
Abstract
Fake News or ‘just’ Satire? Crucial differences in text types may help to identify the former
The rapid expansion of digital media has intensified the circulation of misinformation, disinformation and politically polarised content, posing significant challenges for democratic debate, media literacy and public trust. Terms such as fake news and post-truth highlight the fragility of veracity in contemporary media discourse and reflect broader political and social instability (Maci et al., 2024). Within this environment, fake and satirical news often adopt similar stylistic and rhetorical conventions, making it increasingly difficult for audiences, researchers and automated systems to distinguish malicious deception from legitimate humorous critique. While satire exposes contradictions and criticises power through exaggeration, irony and absurdity, disinformation strategically exploits comparable linguistic resources to legitimise false claims and manipulate opinion. Understanding how these genres differ at the level of language use is therefore essential.
What is presented and discussed here is part of BBVA Leonardo funded project entitled MISFIRE: Metaphor and Intent in Satire and FakeInformation: Rhetorical Evidence (BBVA.LEO26.1.21125) investigates whether patterns of metaphor and evaluative stance function as linguistic cues of communicative intent in fake and satirical news.
Combining corpus linguistics with critical discourse analysis, corpora of fake and satirical news are investigated.
• This particular session will look how metaphors in particular work in satirical texts in order to compare and contrast with occurrences in established Fake News material.
References:
Hidalgo-Tenorio, E., & Castro-Peña, J. L. (2026). Discourse Analysis, Populism and Disinformation in the Spanish Context. In Nessi & Milin (eds) International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-323-95504
Maci, S., Demata, M., McGlashan, M., & Seargeant, P. (Eds.). (2024). The Routledge Handbook of Discourse and Disinformation. Routledge.
Rubin, V. L., Conroy, N., Chen, Y., & Cornwell, S. (2016, June). Fake news or truth? using satirical cues to detect potentially misleading news. In Proceedings of the second workshop on computational approaches to deception detection (pp. 7-17).