tl;dr-ELT

Though hardly a new phenomenon, misinformation only really took hold in the public consciousness when the term fake news went mainstream around a decade ago. Since then, the term has shifted from a fringe concept to a global force shaping elections, public discourse & even how conflicts are understood. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a recent invention. In reality, the phrase first appeared in US newspapers in the late 19^th century to describe sensationalist reporting, resurfaced in the early 2000s to critique online hoaxes & then exploded globally around 2016 as a catch‑all label for misinformation, disinformation & everything in between.

Against this backdrop, linguists Silje Susanne Alvestad & Nele Põldvere at the University of Oslo ask a deceptively simple question in a recent chapter for Advancing Military Practice Through Military Humanities: what does fake news do linguistically to make it so persuasive? They aren’t asking why fake news persuades people in a psychological or social sense. They’re asking what linguistic features fake news uses -the patterns, stance markers, trigrams, metaphors & rhetorical moves that give it persuasive force (A trigram is simply a sequence of three consecutive words that frequently occur together, & in this study they reveal the recurring phrases fake news relies on to sound authoritative or conversational.)

Fake news spans everything from gender politics to climate, migration, public health & celebrity scandals. So why war? The authors focus on war‑related fake news because conflict discourse is high‑stakes, metaphor‑rich & unusually prone to linguistic manipulation. It also provides a large, well‑verified dataset that allows for cleaner comparison between fake & genuine texts. In other words, war is not the only domain where fake news thrives -but it’s an ideal one for uncovering the linguistic fingerprints that make it persuasive.

The study
The researchers built a large English corpus (Fakespeak‑ENG) containing fake & genuine news verified by PolitiFact & Snopes. From this, they extracted 696 war‑related texts (552 fake, 144 genuine; 267,845 words total). They used:

• semantic tagging  to isolate war‑related vocabulary
• corpus sampling to remove irrelevant or metaphorical uses (e.g. shot meaning “vaccine shot”)
• trigram analysis (AntConc) to identify recurring multi‑word patterns
• concordance analysis to examine how these patterns behave in context

Together, these methods allowed the researchers to move beyond what fake news says and instead examine how it works -the linguistic machinery that shapes readers’ interpretations.

The findings
Three linguistic patterns stood out:

1. Attribution without accountability
   Fake news repeatedly used trigrams like our source said, often paired with unverifiable claims. This creates a veneer of authority while avoiding responsibility.
   Example: “Our source confirmed the government is hiding troop movements.”
2. Conversational, subjective stance
   Fake news used I don’t + cognition verbs at much higher rates (e.g. I don’t know, I don’t see, I don’t think).
   This mimics informal talk, builds rapport & frames opinion as common sense.
   Example: “I don’t see how anyone can deny what’s happening.”
3. Contractive, certainty‑building negation
   Phrases like there is no + noun (e.g. there is no excuse, there is no way) were far more common in fake news.
   These forms shut down alternative viewpoints, creating a sense of inevitability or moral clarity.
   Example: “There is no scenario where the military isn’t preparing for conflict.”

The chapter also highlights the power of war metaphors (e.g. war on fossil fuels, war on Christianity). These metaphors frame political disagreements as existential battles, encouraging polarisation & sometimes even action.

This, & similar research, shows that fake news is not just about falsehoods – it’s about linguistic engineering.

Teacher takeaways?

• Help learners notice stance markers (I think, I don’t see, there is no…) & how they shape interpretation.
• Use authentic (fake)‑news excerpts to practise source evaluation: Who is speaking? How do we know?
• Explore metaphor awareness: how framing influences reasoning, especially around conflict or crisis. For example, calling something a war on migration or a battle for our schools doesn’t just describe a situation -it frames it as a zero‑sum conflict with enemies, threats & urgent action. Learners can compare how interpretations shift when the same issue is framed as a challenge, a debate or a policy question instead.´

How do you help learners read critically when the language itself is designed to disarm them?