O impacto da desinformação em discursos de pós-verdade : as fake news como gênero discursivo à luz de estudos dialógicos do Círculo de Bakhtin

Abstract

Fake news is a type of discourse that is deliberately spread in an attempt to misinform their interlocutors, segregating them into ideological bubbles with positions contrary to science and facts. As it stands against the standard media prime objective – which is to inform – they are known by some experts as the phenomenon of misinformation. In this context, fake news has also urged the term “post-truth”, a recent expression, which is referred to as the process upon one personal conviction becomes more important than the facts themselves. These two phenomena are closely intertwined with each other and there is no possibility of observing their occurrences, but through the language, since they happen in the materiality of language in act. The word or the ideological sign par excellence is capable of leading a genre with relatively stable regularities. Thus, by investigating into the discourse what is common in the dissemination of fake news, one can observe what is frequent in its discursive act and this contributes to its designation as a genre. From this perspective, this paper aims to ground the phenomenon of disinformation under the dialogical perspective of the discourse theory, seeking to present how and why false information can be conceived as a relatively stable form of enunciation. This is important, because information and misinformation often get confused with one another, as the notion of truth is resignified and inevitably falls into distorted facts going viral. In this way, we seek to contextualize and problematize the phenomenon of fake news, framing them into the dialogical theory of discourse and, finally, proposing a suggestion of analysis for this concrete material. Thus, this qualitative research seeks, in the first moment, the theoretical apparatus of works that dissert on disinformation; in the second moment, it aims to frame this problem within the context of Bakhtinian discourse theory; and finally, in the third moment, it intends to suggest an analysis that globalizes the subjects discussed above, applying them to two fake news, extracted from virtual media. From this perspective, it is possible to observe that certain specificities contribute to design them as a discursive genre, and their spreading method allow us to point out differences in relation to the ordinary media news. Therefore, it follows that, in addition to the fact that the enunciative projections of fake news have their own theme, style and compositional structure, they would not be the object of any kind of analysis and questioning if it were not for a phenomenon that is very close to it: the post-truth. Thus, there is a need to look into the problem within a translinguistic bias, since much of the studies today are mostly focused on the information sciences. To finally have a look at the area of philosophy of language, as the Circle texts propose, might be helpful in order to boost interest in the subject and increase research in this topic in other areas of knowledge.