Fake news: scientific approaches of its investigation

Abstract

The article describes the systematic nature of scientific approaches to the study of fake news. This problem has been largely studied and many viable solutions have been found. Using the thesaurus method of analysis it has been found that the term “fake news” is considered both in English dictionaries and in the scientific works of domestic and foreign scientists. Moreover, it has been clarified that the theoretical understanding of fake news should be studied within the so-called post-truth era, i.e. a state of modern digital society in which facts are less valuable than the emotions and reactions of people and society. The aim of our paper is to outline the various scientific vectors of fake news investigation in modern linguistics, among which we focus on linguistic and journalistic research methods. It has been found that foreign and domestic scholars compare real news texts and satirical and humorous texts of fake news in order to determine the verbal properties of the latter (comparative analysis). Representatives of this approach have come to the conclusion that fact-checking is a really important task, because the variety of lexical characteristics gives us the opportunity to understand the differences between more reliable and less reliable sources of digital news. It has been noted that the differences between fake and real news can be found in their headlines. Satirical news articles are created for entertainment, to highlight certain negative characteristics of famous people or events, and so on. For this purpose, the content of fake and real news, their headlines, as well as tools of persuasion are studied. The main advantage of computer science methods or network approaches to the study of fake news is that scientists have been able to analyze the spread of fake news, highlighting such criteria as: reliability of news texts, readers’ views, their likes in Facebook posts, checking the features of social interaction. Moreover, scholars are currently using automatic means to detect fake news on the Internet. Scientists study the linguistic, cognitive, communicative and pragmatic parameters of fake news, focusing on their classifications and the phenomenon of comic verbalization.