The Routledge Handbook of Discourse and Disinformation

This handbook fills a gap that other disinformation volumes leave open: language. While most of the field focuses on platforms, algorithms, and political actors, this collection turns to discourse itself — how disinformation is constructed, what rhetorical and persuasive mechanisms it deploys, and how the linguistic analysis of false and misleading content can contribute to detection and counter-strategy. Edited by four applied linguists, it brings together methodological chapters alongside case studies covering climate denial, COVID conspiracies, and political polarisation.

The contribution of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis to the disinformation field has been underappreciated by practitioners who tend to think in platform or policy terms. This handbook corrects that. For anyone engaged in narrative analysis, content monitoring, or the development of detection frameworks, understanding how disinformation is linguistically structured — its rhetorical signals, its persuasive grammar — is operationally useful. The book is a reference work, not a linear read, but it is one of the few that brings rigorous linguistic methodology to bear on a domain that too often relies on quantitative or platform-level analysis alone.