Mining misinformation discourse on social media within the ‘ideological square’

Abstract

A considerable flow of information and news stories are being exchanged on social media in several parts of the world. A significant number of news stories are fake and are published to serve certain purposes and ideologies. The present study examines how Arab social media users respond to fake news in Arabic in reference to van Dijk’s concept of the ideological square. A dataset of fake news was collected from Twitter, now X platform, comprising tweets on various events. After preprocessing, a topic-modeling algorithm was applied to the dataset to reveal its latent aspects. Instances of the featured topics in the dataset were then analyzed in accordance with the sociocognitive approach to critical discourse analysis. The findings demonstrate that fake news was leveraged to promote ideological struggle between social groups. Some social media users may interact with misinformation without evaluating its credibility and, therefore, express ideologically loaded beliefs for or against the subject matter of the news story. Fake news stories were also exploited for business and marketing. Misinformation’s discourse structure involves ideological polarization, self-identification and goal-description, and violates norms and values. The discursive structure and strategies revolve around the ideological square.