In the new age digital era, our social media feeds are increasingly dominated by fake news, disinformation, and digital warfare. Everyday citizens must understand how disinformation is perceived and spread. This is essential for maintaining our democratic institutions.
This report examines the semantic and rhetorical structures of fake news and how everyday people in Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia perceive them. To do this, a sample group examines how disinformation is structured, the rhetoric used to legitimize it, and how resilient the audience is in distinguishing truth from falsehood. How does each country fare compared to the others?
The results reveal a shared resistance to disinformation across all three countries, despite distinct differences in national patterns in narrative style and rhetorical framing.
The collection of reports, created by CEDMO, synthesizes the findings of three interrelated studies examining the structure and perception of disinformation across Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia. Through a comparative lens of each country, the study’s primary objective is to analyze how disinformation is formatted, worded, and interpreted. Together, these studies reveal national patterns in the spread of fake news and examine the resilience of different populations to this misinformation.
Behind the Lie: The Semantic Architecture of Disinformation Narratives
The first study is titled “Disinformation Narratives and Their Semantic Structure (Section 3.1.1).” This study delves deeper into the format and narrative structure of disinformation. By analyzing 1,523 distinct fake news items published between January 2023 and November 2024 and examining how different elements of disinformation narratives interact across regional contexts, the results were telling.
The format of fake news varied widely, encompassing a diverse range of standalone text, combinations of text with photographs or videos, or all three media types. Narratives were taken apart into key semantic components: actors, spatial setting, contextual background, nature of the problem, temporal framing, and the narrator’s perspective. Each country’s results varied, meaning the differences between cultures affect what type of media gains traction.
The results reveal common features of disinformation, including the combination of text and images, as well as a specific worldview in which ordinary people are portrayed as victims of authorities and conspiracies. It is an unfriendly world viewed through the prism of everyday harm experienced by “ordinary people” at the hands of politicians or institutions with power (dominant actor: “everyman” in the role of victim). It is also the world of public experience, of social and civic affairs, and to a lesser extent private; of the center rather than the periphery (the narratives are in public rather than private space, in the city rather than outside it).
However, significant differences were also observed between countries. Polish disinformation favored formats combining text and images, frequently casting ordinary citizens as heroic figures within a victim-centered narrative. These stories were primarily focused on health-related misinformation. Among the data, the Polish fake news had the least amount of first-person or visible author in the messages.
In Czechia, the portrayal of actors, ordinary people versus political institutions, reflected a relatively equal distribution of roles. Narratives often adopt the viewpoint of offenders, and publications are primarily focused on the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
The Slovak fake news in the dataset showed a more even balance between the various format types. Framed mainly from the perspective of offenders, Slovak fake news tended to highlight political institutions as central actors.
Words That Deceive: The Rhetoric Behind Fake News
The second study, “Rhetoric, framing and legitimization of Fake News (3.1.2),” investigated the dominant context of presentation (framing) and rhetorical construction of fake news messages. Types of framing include the use of conspiracy theories, elite violence, social conflict, and threat construction. Rhetorical tools include emotional appeals and misinformation tactics, such as fake quotes or pseudo-experts. Wording may misuse the terminology, artificial polarization, emotional exaggeration, strategic use of false “experts,” fabricated quotations, and a performative act of “revealing” hidden truths. To be seen as accurate, a piece of fake news media needs to be legitimized. Legitimization methods involve moral evaluation, rationalization, authorization, irony, or storytelling with moral lessons.
Such an interpretation is confirmed by the observed dominant measures of a rhetorical nature, which, on the one hand, refer to emotions and/or emotion-inducing areas (such as polarization), and, on the other hand, correlate with the characteristic features of conspiracy theories, such as the linking of distant facts or the misuse of concepts.
The dominant form of legitimization is by reference to ethical norms, and therefore, the “right” world order. The reality constructed by fake news, to some extent, reflects the reality of data and authority. Still, above all, the world of moral judgment is directed at actions that disrupt the proper (natural, just) order of things.
Country-specific trends revealed the most notable differences in framing, rhetorical emphasis, and legitimization strategies. This shows how much the fake news caters to the differences of each country.
Polish fake media emphasized the strong themes of elite violence and societal division. Its rhetorical approach is intensely polarizing and conspiratorial, with moral judgment serving as the primary tool of legitimization.
Czechia demonstrates that fake news is often constructed around dominant conspiracy theories and heavily charged emotional rhetoric. However, the legitimization strategies here are relatively balanced, drawing from both moral and rational appeals.
Slovakia demonstrates that the rhetoric often centers on discrediting institutional authority and “uncovering secrets,” thereby positioning the speaker as a truth-teller. The tone is often ironic or mocking, and legitimization typically relies on rational-sounding arguments that mimic logical discourse.
Lies that Stick: How Convincing Are Fake Messages?
Unlike the first two studies, the third study titled “Structure of disinformation (3.1.3)” conducted two experimental studies to examine the impact of content-related variables on audience perception.
The experiments manipulated the presence of an author and the use of emotional rhetoric, while the second focused on the interactions between rationalization and emotional appeal. Both studies aimed to investigate whether specific narrative structures or rhetorical strategies enhanced the perceived credibility of fake news among the general public.
The results of both experiments contradicted the initial hypothesis, which had anticipated significant shifts in perception based on the type of disinformation presented; instead, the results revealed a high level of resistance to disinformation across all three countries studied. One can infer that a stable level of skepticism toward disinformation exists, regardless of variations in emotionality and rationality, among the participants. However, there are country-specific trends that highlight minor distinctions in how content features influence perception in each population.
There is evidence that susceptibility to disinformation forms a similar structure across the three countries, with only minor country-specific variations. In all three countries, susceptibility to misinformation is most significant for neutral and depersonalized information. On the other hand, the emotionally charged message without a first-person narrative is least convincing. Susceptibility is lowest for emotionally charged but impersonal images. The overall susceptibility to disinformation in Poland is lower than in Czechia and Slovakia.
These findings suggest that although the average European audience exhibits a baseline resistance to disinformation, specific narrative and rhetorical elements still shape how truth is perceived, often in culturally distinct ways. Recipients of media content recognize the manipulative intention hidden in the combination of the content with a photo visible from a distance (large red letters) and disturbing (faces resembling enslaved people). In manipulative messages, such graphics serve to attract attention. However, it turns out that this happens at the expense of the message’s effectiveness.
Conclusion:
These studies offer a unique comparison among Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia, revealing how narrative structure, rhetorical tools, and content features are adapted to national contexts. Narratives of disinformation rely heavily on what triggers a reaction, targeting either emotional or semantic attributes. Participants consistently favored messages with lower emotional intensity and more explicit moral reasoning, and the effectiveness of manipulative content did not vary significantly across the three countries in which it was experimented. Each country demonstrates a unique pattern of message construction tailored to its context; however, societies across all three countries exhibit a notable resistance to disinformation. These experimental findings challenge common assumptions about the fragility of public perception and highlight the importance of teaching media literacy and critical thinking, rather than relying solely on content moderation and accepting everything that is seen. As disinformation tactics evolve, understanding the semantic and rhetorical mechanics behind fake news remains crucial for developing effective countermeasures.
Studies were co-authored by Karina Stasuk-Krajewska, Michał Wenzel, Jakub Kuś, and Ivan R. Cuker.