Sensitivity to Fake News: Reception Analysis with NooJ

The power of the image is to touch the deepest feelings of the audience (indignation, compassion, sublimation, fear, hatred, astonishment, etc.). Internet users, who are often drowned in a permanent flow of information, are not led to analyze an image. They are simply touched, affected by the content. This appeal to emotion is a favorable ground for the deployment of post-truth. Post-truth is a situation where the reality of facts influences public opinion less than the appeal to emotions and personal beliefs. It is the emotion that prevails, the truth has become secondary. We decided to undertake a reception study with students of the Information-Communication OTC, aiming to understand their (in-)capacity to discern infox in a digital context, their verbalization of personal emotions and the forms of self-involvement in the discourse. After having collected over two consecutive years the reactions of about 80 students to several kinds of pictures in context and out of context, we will show how NooJ allows us to bring out the personal involvement in discourse, and the differences in student's permeability once they have been a bit sensitized to this issue. We will use lexicon analysis, concordances analysis, but also semantic information analysis (on expressed feelings for example). We have been interested in ethos in discourse, and we will see that it is often associated with emotional reactions, making a clear link with the emotional web that has been strongly emerging in recent years.