Linguistic Markers of Fake News in Pakistani Political Discourse: A Corpus-Based Forensic Linguistic Study

Abstract

As digital media platforms have grown in scale, so has the amount of fake news and political misinformation spreading throughout the world. Emotionally manipulative, sensational and ideologically polarizing content has become the hallmark of the political discourse on social media like Facebook, X (formerly known as Twitter), YouTube and online news portals in Pakistan. There is little to no research that explored the linguistic features of fake political discourse in the Pakistani context using forensic linguistic and corpus-based approaches despite the remarkable impact of fake political news on peoples' opinion and democratic processes. In this regard, the present quantitative study aims to explore the linguistic indicators of fake news in the context of political discourse in Pakistan based on forensic linguistic approach. The study was of quantitative research and created a special corpus of 200 political news texts, of which 100 were fake political news and 100 were authentic political news texts taken from Pakistani digital media platforms in the year 2023 to 2025. The collected data were analyzed using an antConc corpus analysis software, which includes lexical frequency, emotional vocabulary, certainty markers, usage of pronouns, sensational lexical items and modality patterns. The results showed substantial differences between fake and authentic political discourse in the language used. Fake political news showed higher levels of emotionally charged lexicon, hyperbole expressions of certainty, ideological pronouns, and sensational lexical options used for persuasion and political manipulation. The lexical patterns as well as the structures of modality and factual reporting in political news were, however, rather neutral in the authentic ones. The study finds that linguistic markers have a considerable impact in the distinction between fake political discourse and real political communication in Pakistan. The results are relevant to forensic linguistics, corpus linguistics, digital misinformation research and have implications for media literacy, fake news identification, and political communication research.Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Keywords: Fake News, Forensic Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Political Discourse, Misinformation, Pakistani Media Discourse