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Description
The concepts ‘fake news’, ‘disinformation’, and ‘conspiracy theory’ are often perceived as denoting discrete and describable categories of problematic content. Yet in public discourse, besides functioning as classifications, these terms also function metadiscursively: their use reflects socially-mediated judgments on discourse, ideologically positions participants in interaction, and signals normative ideas about legitimacy in political discourse. This warrants a unifying analysis that explores how these terms are reflexively engaged with in online interactions.
The current paper analyses a corpus of user comments from The New York Times in response to the 2016, 2020, and 2024 US presidential elections, using the comments as a case of mainstream-platform political talk. It analyses how language users mobilized the epistemic labels ‘fake news’, ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘disinformation’ at various points in time, and how the terms’ usage shifted across these three pivotal moments. Through corpus-linguistic analysis (including collocation and frequency patterns) and qualitative coding, the analysis focuses on language users’ first-order (emic) interpretations: explicit metalanguage and metacommunication revealing participants’ views of the terms’ meanings, their usage, and how they are linked to stereotypical personae.
The concepts' shared orientation to truth and authority renders their usage across the dataset highly adversarial. The labels frequently function as a means of contestation, foregrounding not only disagreement about certain propositions, but about the terms of discourse themselves. As disputes recurrently target the legitimacy of labeling (rather than merely the factuality of propositions), they make shared epistemic frames harder to sustain. Over time, some terms increasingly attract metadiscourse, attesting to their entrenchment as flashpoints for contesting epistemic authority. The findings have implications for ongoing debates on polarization in contemporary democratic societies, as their usage may escalate disagreement.