Discursive Strategies of Disinformation about Covid-19: Interdiscursivity and Truth Effects in Youtube Videos

Based on theoretical contributions from French Discourse Analysis (DA), especially from Maingueneau (2008, 2010), this article investigates the forms of interdiscursivity through which disinformative utterances about COVID-19 aimed to interact with the scientific discursive field. The corpus consists of videos published between February and March 2020 on three Brazilian YouTube channels, which were part of the main disinformation networks on COVID-19 at the beginning of the pandemic, according to Machado et al. (2020) study. The analysis evidenced two discursive strategies: the enunciative emulation of structures from scientific discourse and the decontextualized incorporation of fragments of scientific utterances. In both cases, the discursive articulations aimed to produce truth effects to legitimize disinformative utterances to a presumed audience who is not very familiar with the rules of the scientific discursive field.

Keywords:
Discourse analysis; Disinformation; Interdiscursivity; Covid-19; YouTube