Language, Reception and Emotion: The Conference “Language and Communication Aspects of Disinformation”
The conference “Language and Communication Aspects of Disinformation” in Bratislava, organised by the Ľ. Štúr Institute of Linguistics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, examined the linguistic, discursive and narrative mechanisms of disinformation and presented, among other things, the findings of the same-name-project, “Language and Communication Aspects of Disinformation” . Key topics included fear speech, conspiracy theories, fake news, disinformation on social media, linguistic methods of analysis, and interventions against disinformation.
From a linguistic perspective, the conference highlighted the importance of examining discursive, argumentative and pragmatic patterns (Dominika Beneš Kováčová und Jiří Lukl). Individual linguistic features, such as particular words, morphosyntactic structures or sentence types, are not sufficient to reliably identify disinformation. At the same time, fact-checking alone is not an adequate strategy. Ideally, it should be complemented by an analysis of linguistic, argumentative, discursive and emotional mechanisms, such as emotional and fear-inducing language, argumentative and narrative patterns, polarisation and moral judgement, selective use of sources, and the construction of threat and group belonging.
The linguistic studies also showed that human-produced texts vary considerably depending on the author, text type and editorial guidelines (Xinying Chen und Michaela Nogolová). This makes it difficult to detect disinformation on the basis of linguistic features alone. There was an assumption in the discussion that AI-generated and human texts will become increasingly similar in the future. People are increasingly using AI to produce texts, while AI is also beginning to influence human language use. Detecting disinformation therefore requires a mix of methods in which linguistic analysis works together with an examination of content, source and context of dissemination.
Disinformation as Fear Speech
A particularly interesting approach was to view disinformation as a form of fear speech. As Tomáš Koblížek showed, such communication does not necessarily contain explicit insults or clearly false statements. It can, however, portray groups or social developments as a threat and thereby generate fear, uncertainty or rejection.
Conspiracy Theories and Victimhood
From the perspective of reception, Pavol Hardoš’s observation was particularly relevant: communities whose collective identity is strongly shaped by experiences of victimisation may be especially susceptible to conspiracy theories. In my view, this idea can also be extended to disinformation in general. Conspiracy narratives can tap into existing experiences of disadvantage, threat or loss of control. As a result, they do not necessarily appear more factually convincing to certain communities, but they resonate more strongly on an emotional level and in terms of identity.
Believing Not What Is True, but What Is “Right”
The contributions by Vladimíra Čavojová and Matej Lorko on interventions against disinformation showed that study participants evaluated information more accurately when they were rewarded specifically for correct answers. This suggests that people may already have the ability to distinguish reliable information from disinformation, but do not apply this ability with the same attention and motivation in every situation.
Linguistic and AI-Assisted Analysis
Enikő Németh showed that combining fact-checking with AI-assisted linguistic analysis can identify potential disinformation in more than 90 per cent of the cases examined, whereas human participants achieved around 60 per cent. Among other things, the application developed was able to detect emotionally charged language and flag it as, for example, “fear-inducing” or “highly emotional”. Ervin Etaywe also used AI to support discourse analysis and discussed it as a potentially helpful tool for identifying disinformation.
Visible Research Gaps
The conference also revealed some research gaps. Multilingualism, language-specific targeting of audiences, and the information practices of migrants and multilingual communities were largely outside the research focus. These gaps show how important it is to study disinformation in multilingual contexts as a complex, socially situated communicative phenomenon.
Many thanks to the conference organising committee (Lucia Molnár Satinská, Estera Köverová, Jaroslava Rusinková, Roman Soóky, Slavomíra Stanková, Júlia Vrábľová and Barbora Kavečanská) for the diverse interdisciplinary programme and the productive academic exchange.
All conference abstracts are available as a PDF: https://www.juls.savba.sk/attachments/disinfo(2f)program/LANCOD_Book_of_Abstracts-1.pdf
This post was translated from the original German post by Dariia Orobchuk with the help of AI and reviewed by the editor.
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