Cover not available
Part of
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
References
Allchin, Douglas
2021 “Who Speaks for Science?” Science & Education, October. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Allcott, Hunt, and Matthew Gentzkow
2017 “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 31 (2): 211–36. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Alonso, Miguel A., David Vilares, Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, and Jesús Vilares
2021 “Sentiment Analysis for Fake News Detection.” Electronics 10 (11): 1348. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Antiochou, Konstantina, and Stathis Psillos
2022 “How to Handle Reasonable Scientific Disagreement: The Case of Covid-19.” In The Pandemic of Argumentation, edited by Steve Oswald, Marcin Lewiński, Sara Greco, and Serena Villata, 61–78. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Arias, Juan
2021 “Se Depois Da CPI Bolsonaro Ficar Impune, Será Um Escárnio Nacional.” El País, no. 26 November. [URL] 26 Nov 2021.
Azevedo, Mario Luiz Neves de, and Susan Lee Robertson
2021 “Authoritarian Populism in Brazil: Bolsonaro’s Caesarism, ‘Counter-Trasformismo’ and Reactionary Education Politics.” Globalisation, Societies and Education, July, 1–12. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bentham, Jeremy
1824 The Book of Fallacies. London, UK: John and H. L. Hunt. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bosc, Tom, Elena Cabrio, and Serena Villata
2016 “Tweeties Squabbling: Positive and Negative Results in Applying Argument Mining on Social Media.” In Computational Models of Argument, edited by Pietro Baroni, Thomas Gordon, Tatjana Scheffler, and Manfred Stede, 21–32. Amsterdam, Netherlands: IOS Press.Google Scholar
Bourse, Sarah
2018 “Conjuring up Terror and Tears: The Evocative and Persuasive Power of Loaded Words in the Political Discourse on Drug Reform.” Lexis, no. 13 (February). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brooker, Phillip, Julie Barnett, and Timothy Cribbin
2016 “Doing Social Media Analytics.” Big Data & Society 3 (2): 1–12. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cancian, Natália
2020 “Após Quatro Meses Como ‘Provisório Eterno’, General Toma Posse Como Ministro Efetivo Da Saúde.” Folha, no. 16 September. [URL].
Chan, Man-pui Sally, Christopher R. Jones, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, and Dolores Albarracín
2017 “Debunking: A Meta-Analysis of the Psychological Efficacy of Messages Countering Misinformation.” Psychological Science 28 (11): 1531–46. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Conway, Bethany Anne, Kate Kenski, and Di Wang
2013 “Twitter Use by Presidential Primary Candidates during the 2012 Campaign.” American Behavioral Scientist 57 (11): 1596–1610. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cummings, Louise
2020 “Good and Bad Reasoning about Covid-19.” Informal Logic 40 (4): 521–44. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2021 “Douglas Walton and the Covid-19 Crisis.” Journal of Applied Logics 8 (1): 31–51.Google Scholar
Dalyot, Keren, Yael Rozenblum, and Ayelet Baram-Tsabari
2022 “Justification of Decision-Making in Response to Covid-19 Socio-Scientific Dilemmas.” In The Pandemic of Argumentation, edited by Steve Oswald, Marcin Lewiński, Sara Greco, and Serena Villata, 239–57. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Diethelm, P., and M. McKee
2008 “Denialism: What Is It and How Should Scientists Respond?” The European Journal of Public Health 19 (1): 2–4. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dusmanu, Mihai, Elena Cabrio, and Serena Villata
2017 “Argument Mining on Twitter: Arguments, Facts and Sources.” In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, edited by Martha Palmer, Rebecca Hwa, and Sebastian Riedel, 2317–22. Copenhagen, Denmark: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Eemeren, Frans van, and Rob Grootendorst
1992 Argumentation, Communication, and Fallacies: A Pragma-Dialectical Perspective. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Enders, Adam M., Joseph E. Uscinski, Casey Klofstad, and Justin Stoler
2020 “The Different Forms of Covid-19 Misinformation and Their Consequences.” Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, November. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fairclough, Isabella, and Norman Fairclough
2012 Political Discourse Analysis: A Method for Advanced Students. London, UK: Routledge.Google Scholar
Fields, Lindsay, and John Licato
2022 “Combatting Conspiratorial Thinking with Controlled Argumentation Dialogue Environments.” In The Pandemic of Argumentation, edited by Steve Oswald, Marcin Lewiński, Sara Greco, and Serena Villata, 279–97. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fonseca, Elize Massard da, Nicoli Nattrass, Lira Luz Benites Lazaro, and Francisco Inácio Bastos
2021 “Political Discourse, Denialism and Leadership Failure in Brazil’s Response to Covid-19.” Global Public Health 16 (8–9): 1251–66. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Garrett, Laurie
2020 “Covid-19: The Medium Is the Message.” The Lancet 395 (10228): 942–43. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goddard, Cliff
2018 “Words as Carriers of Cultural Meaning.” In Ten Lectures on Natural Semantic MetaLanguage, edited by Cliff Goddard, 159–93. Leiden, Netherlands, and Boston, MA: Brill Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Guess, Andrew, Brendan Nyhan, and Jason Reifler
2018 “Selective Exposure to Misinformation: Evidence from the Consumption of Fake News during the 2016 US Presidential Campaign.” European Research Council 9 (3): 4.Google Scholar
Haman, Michael
2020 “The Use of Twitter by State Leaders and Its Impact on the Public during the Covid-19 Pandemic.” Heliyon 6 (11): e05540. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hamblin, Charles Leonard
1970 Fallacies. London, UK: Methuen.Google Scholar
Hampsher-Monk, Iain
1998 “Speech Acts, Languages or Conceptual History?” In History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives, edited by Iain Hampsher-Monk, Karin Tilmans, and Frank van Vree, 37–50. Comparative Perspectives. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press. [URL]. DOI logo
Hansen, Hans, and Douglas Walton
2013 “Argument Kinds and Argument Roles in the Ontario Provincial Election.” Journal of Argumentation in Context 2 (2): 226–58. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Häyry, Matti
2021 “The Covid-19 Pandemic: Healthcare Crisis Leadership as Ethics Communication.” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 30 (1): 42–50. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hitchcock, David
2017 On Reasoning and Argument: Essays in Informal Logic and on Critical Thinking. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hornikx, Jos
2022 “On the Conditional Acceptance of Arguments from Expert Opinion.” In The Pandemic of Argumentation, edited by Steve Oswald, Marcin Lewiński, Sara Greco, and Serena Villata, 343–59. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ilatov, Zinaida
1993 “Manipulations in Argumentation.” Argumentation 7 (3): 359–67. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ilie, Cornelia
2024 “Manipulating Citizens’ Beliefs and Emotions: Consensus-Seeking and Dissensus – Generating Tactics in Times of Crisis.” In Manufacturing Dissent: Manipulation and counter-manipulation in times of crisis, edited by Cornelia Ilie, 85–118. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Katermina, Veronika, and Ekaterina Yachenko
2020 “Axiology of Covid-19 as a Linguistic Phenomenon in English Mass Media Discourse.” Advances in Journalism and Communication 08 (02): 59–67. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kecskes, Istvan
2003 Situation-Bound Utterances in L1 and L2. Berlin, Germany, and New York, NY: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kilgarriff, Adam
2012 “Getting to Know Your Corpus.” In International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue, edited by Petr Sojka, Pala Aleš, Horák Ivan, and Kopeček Karel, 3–15. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer. DOI logo
Kilgarriff, Adam, Vít Baisa, Jan Bušta, Miloš Jakubíček, Vojtěch Kovář, Jan Michelfeit, Pavel Rychlý, and Vít Suchomel
2014 “The Sketch Engine: Ten Years On.” Lexicography 1 (1): 7–36. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kim, Do Kyun David, and Gary L. Kreps
2020 “An Analysis of Government Communication in the United States During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Recommendations for Effective Government Health Risk Communication.” World Medical & Health Policy 12 (4): 398–412. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kuhn, Deanna
2001 “How Do People Know?” Psychological Science 12 (1): 1–8. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2002 “What Is Scientific Thinking and How Does It Develop?” In The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development. Second Edition, edited by Usha Goswami, 497–523. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2019 “Critical Thinking as Discourse.” Human Development 62 (3): 146–64. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kuhn, Deanna, Richard Cheney, and Michael Weinstock
2000 “The Development of Epistemological Understanding.” Cognitive Development 15 (3): 309–328. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kuhn, Deanna, and Wadiya Udell
2003 “The Development of Argument Skills.” Child Development 74 (5): 1245–60. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kuhn, Deanna, Michael Weinstock, and Robin Flaton
1994 “How Well Do Jurors Reason? Competence Dimensions of Individual Variation in a Juror Reasoning Task.” Psychological Science 5 (5): 289–96. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Levisen, Carsten, and Sophia Waters
2017 “How Words Do Things with People.” In Cultural Keywords in Discourse, edited by Carsten Levisen and Sophia Waters, 1–23. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lewandowsky, Stephan, Ullrich Ecker, Colleen Seifert, Norbert Schwarz, and John Cook
2012 “Misinformation and Its Correction.” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 13 (3): 106–31. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Li, Zuhe, Yangyu Fan, Bin Jiang, Tao Lei, and Weihua Liu
2019 “A Survey on Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining for Social Multimedia.” Multimedia Tools and Applications 78 (6): 6939–67. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Macagno, Fabrizio
2014 “Manipulating Emotions. Value-Based Reasoning and Emotive Language.” Argumentation & Advocacy 51 (2): 103–22. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015 “A Means-End Classification of Argumentation Schemes.” In Reflections on Theoretical Issues in Argumentation Theory, edited by Frans van Eemeren and Bart Garssen, 183–201. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2017 “The Logical and Pragmatic Structure of Arguments from Analogy.” Logique et Analyse 60 (240): 465–90. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2018 “A Dialectical Approach to Presupposition.” Intercultural Pragmatics 15 (2): 291–313. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2019 “Analizzare l’argomentazione Sui Social Media. Il Caso Dei Tweet Di Salvini.” Sistemi Intelligenti, no. 3: 601–32. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2022a “Argumentation Profiles and the Manipulation of Common Ground. The Arguments of Populist Leaders on Twitter.” Journal of Pragmatics 191: 67–82. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2022b “Argumentation Profiles.” Informal Logic 42 (1): 83–138. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Macagno, Fabrizio, and Sarah Bigi
2017 “Analyzing the Pragmatic Structure of Dialogues.” Discourse Studies 19 (2): 148–68. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Macagno, Fabrizio, and Beatriz Gil
2021 “Análise Argumentativa Nas Redes Sociais: Bolsonaro No Twitter. Uma Abordagem Preliminar.” In Retórica Mediatizada – a Comunicação Persuasiva Através Dos Media, edited by Ivone Ferreira and Samuel Mateus, 97-122. Lisbon, Portugal: Sistema Solar e Documenta.Google Scholar
Macagno, Fabrizio, and Douglas Walton
2010 “What We Hide in Words: Emotive Words and Persuasive Definitions.” Journal of Pragmatics 42 (7): 1997–2013. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014 Emotive Language in Argumentation. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015 “Classifying the Patterns of Natural Arguments.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 48 (1): 26–53. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Macagno, Fabrizio, Douglas Walton, and Christopher Tindale
2014 “Analogical Reasoning and Semantic Rules of Inference.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 270 (4): 419–32. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Malinverni, Claudia, and Jacqueline Isaac Machado Brigagão
2020 “Covid-19: Scientific Arguments, Denialism, Eugenics, and the Construction of the Antisocial Distancing Discourse in Brazil.” Frontiers in Communication 5 (November). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marinho, Cristina, and Michael Billig
2024 “How Can Governments Be Prevented from Manipulating Statistics about Covid-19? An Example from UK Politics.” In Manufacturing Dissent: Manipulation and counter-manipulation in times of crisis, edited by Cornelia Ilie, 186–214. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mohammed, Dima, and Maria Grazia Rossi
2022 “The Argumentative Potential of Doubt: From Legitimate Concerns to Conspiracy Theories About Covid-19 Vaccines.” In The Pandemic of Argumentation, edited by Steve Oswald, Marcin Lewiński, Sara Greco, and Serena Villata, 117–36. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mohd Nor, Nor Fariza, and Adlyn Syahirah Zulcafli
2020 “Corpus Driven Analysis of News Reports about Covid-19 in a Malaysian Online Newspaper.” GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies 20 (3): 199–220. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Musi, Elena, and Andrea Rocci
2022 “Staying up to Date with Fact and Reason Checking: An Argumentative Analysis of Outdated News.” In The Pandemic of Argumentation, edited by Steve Oswald, Marcin Lewiński, Sara Greco, and Serena Villata, 299–318. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Musolff, Andreas, Ruth Breeze, Kayo Kondo, and Sara Vilar-Lluch
eds. 2022 Pandemic and Crisis Discourse: Communicating Covid-19 and Public Health Strategy. London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Neves, Sofia, and Rui Barros
2021 “Portugal é o Primeiro País Do Mundo a Ter 85% Da População Vacinada Contra a Covid-19.” Público, no. 9 October. [URL].
Nunes, Maíra
2021 “Entenda Os Desgastes Que Pressionam a Saída de Pazuello Do Ministério Da Saúde.” Correio Braziliense, no. 14 March. [URL].
Olimat, Sameer Naser
2020 “Words as Powerful Weapons: Dysphemism in Trump’s Covid-19 Speeches.” 3L The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies 26 (3): 17–29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ott, Brian L.
2017 “The Age of Twitter: Donald J. Trump and the Politics of Debasement.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 34 (1): 59–68. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Perelman, Chaïm, and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca
1969 The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.Google Scholar
Pool, Javad, Farhad Fatehi, and Saeed Akhlaghpour
2021 “Infodemic, Misinformation and Disinformation in Pandemics: Scientific Landscape and the Road Ahead for Public Health Informatics Research.” In . DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Puig, Blanca, Paloma Blanco-Anaya, and Jorge J. Pérez-Maceira
2021 “ ‘Fake News’ or Real Science? Critical Thinking to Assess Information on Covid-19.” Frontiers in Education 6 (May). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rapanta, Chrysi, and Douglas Walton
2016 “Identifying Paralogisms in Two Ethnically Different Contexts at University Level/Identificación de Paralogismos En Dos Contextos Universitarios Diferenciados Étnicamente.” Infancia y Aprendizaje 39 (1): 119–49. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rigotti, Eddo, and Sara Greco-Morasso
2009 “Argumentation as an Object of Interest and as a Social and Cultural Resource.” In Argumentation and Education, edited by Nathalie Muller-Mirza and Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont, 9–66. Boston, MA: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rigotti, Eddo, and Andrea Rocci
2005 “From Argument Analysis to Cultural Keywords (and Back Again).” In Argumentation in Practice, edited by Frans van Eemeren and Peter Houtlosser, 125–42. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shu, Kai, Amy Sliva, Suhang Wang, Jiliang Tang, and Huan Liu
2017 “Fake News Detection on Social Media: A Data Mining Perspective.” ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter 19 (1): 22–36. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Silva, Patrícia, Edna Costa, and João Moniz
2021 “A Portuguese Miracle: The Politics of the First Phase of Covid-19 in Portugal.” South European Society and Politics, October, 1–29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stevenson, Charles
1944 Ethics and Language. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Sultan, Sultan, and Muhammad Rapi
2020 “Positive Discourse Analysis of the Indonesian Government Spokesperson’s Discursive Strategies during the Covid-19 Pandemic.” GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies 20 (4): 251–72. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tandoc, Edson C., Zheng Wei Lim, and Richard Ling
2018 “Defining ‘Fake News.’” Digital Journalism 6 (2): 137–53. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
United Nations
2020 “United Nations Guidance Note on Addressing and Countering Covid-19 Related Hate Speech.” New York, NY. [URL].
Valfré, Vinícius, and André Shalders
2021 “Mandetta Diz Que Presidência Avaliou Decreto Para Incluir Covid Na Bula Da Cloroquina.” Estadão, no. 4 May. [URL].
Walton, Douglas
1992 The Place of Emotion in Argument. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
1995 A Pragmatic Theory of Fallacy. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.Google Scholar
2006 Fundamentals of Critical Argumentation. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
2007 Media Argumentation: Dialectic, Persuasion and Rhetoric. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010 “Why Fallacies Appear to Be Better Arguments than They Are.” Informal Logic 30 (2): 159–84. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Walton, Douglas, Christopher Reed, and Fabrizio Macagno
2008 Argumentation Schemes. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Waszak, Przemyslaw M., Wioleta Kasprzycka-Waszak, and Alicja Kubanek
2018 “The Spread of Medical Fake News in Social Media – The Pilot Quantitative Study.” Health Policy and Technology 7 (2): 115–18. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wierzbicka, Anna
1997 Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wilkinson, Timothy
2017 “Counter-Manipulation and Health Promotion.” Public Health Ethics 10 (3): 257–66. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
World Health Organization
2020 “Managing the Covid-19 Infodemic: Promoting Healthy Behaviours and Mitigating the Harm from Misinformation and Disinformation.” [URL].
Yokoyama, OlgaT
1988 “Disbelief, Lies, and Manipulations in a Transactional Discourse Model.” Argumentation 2 (1). DOI logoGoogle Scholar