A Linguistic Approach to Misinformation in Chinese

Identifying useful information is increasingly important and difficult. Correct information is crucial in when we make our decisions, regardless in finance/economy, health and politics. Yet, the amount of misinformation has been rising in all these aspects. Existing works primarily focus on the truthfulness of information using data in English, and either ignore unverifiable claims or categorize them with misinformation (also known as ‘fake news’). However, this approach often disregards misleading information or conspiracy, which can be as dangerous as verifiably wrong information. From a linguistic perspective, the present study analyzes headlines of 69,170 extracted articles in Chinese and identifies their linguistic features. Results show that misinformation in Chinese use emotive language and hyperbole to get readers’ attention, which echoes previous studies on clickbaits and shows that these tactics in misinformation are shared across languages. We further argue that these tactics are particularly obvious, when the articles are categorized based on the topics. Through an analysis of commonly used phrases and keywords, we discuss how the word list can be further developed into an identification system for misinformation.