Online Manipulation in Inspirational Messages: A Case Study
Online Manipulation in Inspirational Messages: A Case Study

Summary/Abstract: In September 2018 in Germany, you can find outdoor, therefore offline advertisements for an online service provider: Facebook. The main message of the campaign is that Facebook is fighting against “fakeness”: against fake accounts and fake news. This is only one example for the relevance of “fakelessness” and credibility nowadays. This paper copes with online manipulation, drawing on the example of a case study on Hungarian motivational messages. Inspirational messages (as well as fake news, pseudo-scientific texts) often show clear signs of deceptive nature, still they are shared by many users on Facebook. What could be the reason for this? The paper tries to answer the question by analysing the characteristics of inspirational messages.

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