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Manufacturing Dissent: Manipulation and counter-manipulation in times of crisis
Edited by Cornelia Ilie
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 339] 2024
► pp. 240–283

Chapter 8
Strategic communication in the Covid-19 pandemic

Uses of arguments and manipulative tactics in institutional social media communication

 | Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de Lisboa
 | IFILNOVA, Universidade Nova de Lisboa
The Covid-19 pandemic underscored the crucial importance of arguments in developing citizens’ trust and the social risks of manipulation. However, how to assess and describe the argumentative and manipulative strategies of institutional actors? In this paper, the institutional argumentation of the governing leaders and the Health Ministries of Brazil and Portugal are coded and analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively through the use of argumentation profiles, which are used for classifying and capturing the types of arguments, the fallacies, and the emotive language of each speaker. The results show how the different approaches to the crisis of the two countries are mirrored by distinct argumentative strategies indicating distinct communicative goals, namely pandemic campaigning and joint decision-making.
Keywords: argumentation, discourse analysis, manipulation, pandemic, trust, info-arguments, campaigning, decision-making, fallacies
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Pandemic manipulation
  • 3.Corpus
    • 3.1Context: The pandemic and the countries’ responses
    • 3.2Corpus construction
  • 4.Method of analysis
    • 4.1Types of arguments
    • 4.2Evaluation of arguments
    • 4.3Emotive words and the use of emotions
  • 5.Results: Quantitative analysis
    • 5.1Types of argument
    • 5.2Argument quality
    • 5.3Keywords
  • 6.Qualitative analysis
  • 7.Discussion and limitations
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 17 January 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.339.08mac
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Ilie, Cornelia
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