Disinformation, misinformation and fake news in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. A corpus-based approach

The Covid-19 outbreak and its dissemination resulted in the creation of a new, specialised and global discourse among the population. This paper aims to investigate a tsunami of dis- and misinformation on the basis of selected, most frequently occurring, items of fake news to show how the ‘infodemic’ (Covid-19-related misinformation) has expanded, and how fake news is structured. The paper concludes by presenting patterns of fake news, including grammar structures, the frequency of the given lemmas and collocations, in the hope that it will provide greater transparency, help to flatten the ‘infodemic’ curve and make the readers more aware of how myths about coronavirus have been formed during the pandemic.