Debunking Fake News through the Multimodal Composition of Internet Memes

This chapter reports on an implementation of Inoculation Theory which was devised at the University of Salento, and which aims to educate people to resist persuasion as well as to enhance their critical thinking by means of engaging and interactive multimedia texts. The implementation under discussion resorts to memes, the viral text types that are shared over the Internet and which can be used to spread misinformation. In this study, memes are presented as a tool helping to counteract fabrication in fake news. Twenty-six undergraduate students in Modern Literatures, representing people that communicate online and consume online texts, were asked to design memes where the interaction between linguistic and extralinguistic elements is meant to produce humorous and derogatory representations that should attract the recipients’ interests before proposing to them facts about the Covid-19 pandemic from reliable sources. The analysis of the selected corpus of samples will illustrate the extent to which the multimodal composition of the original creations activates inferential processes whereby addressees are urged to question the truthfulness of the fake news items that are diffused via social media posts.