Resumen de Analysis of ideological discourse in rumors and memes, go beyond the insults of Captain Haddock

Paulo Simões, Ana Cristina dos Santos Guerreiro

• The goals of this study are: to characterize fake news transmitted through memes about Covid-19 in Brazil; to understand how the composition of these speeches is typified; and to discuss the categories of compositional meta-function from the perspective of multimodality. It is a relevant subject for design, namely for the study of discourse in images. The genealogy of critical discourse present in Internet memes underlines the concept of the era of fake news and, with it, a list of ontological, ethical, and aesthetic problems. The use of memes is instrumental in the discussion of traditional issues and innovation in society. For the operationalization of the study, the following questions were asked: What is the degree of ideological power invested in Internet memes that communicate fake news? Can these graphic speeches be considered illegitimate? The methodology consists of selecting memes extracted for convenience from a sample present on the social networks with the largest number of users. The selection was supported and validated by fake news audit sites during the Covid-19 pandemic period. Given a narrative structural evaluation, multimodal analysis of the critical and iconoclastic discourse was made. The intention was to highlight the utterance structuring and show the hostility focuses and the ideological orientations that probably emerged from the meme. The findings indicate that fake news speeches operated through iconographic memes are aimed at ideologically antagonistic targets by their authors.