Știrile False: Câteva Sugestii De Analiză

Abstract The article argues that fake news is not a modern invention but a long-standing practice that has gained unprecedented scale and impact in the contemporary “post-truth” era. While global events such as elections, Brexit, and the war in Ukraine have intensified scholarly interest in fake news, research on this phenomenon in Romanian remains limited, despite clear societal vulnerabilities in Romania and the Republic of Moldova. The article highlights major challenges in studying fake news, including definitional ambiguity, verification difficulties, and the subjective evaluation of truth and falsity. Existing communication-focused and computational approaches are shown to be methodologically insufficient, particularly due to weak typologies and limited linguistic insight. To address these gaps, the article proposes a clear definition of fake news and a refined taxonomy of news types, advocating for qualitative, linguistically grounded analyses alongside quantitative methods, with special attention to Romanian-language corpora.