The COVID-19 Hoax News in Indonesia Context: Looking Beyond the Essence Using Content Analysis

Yusri Yusri; Mantasiah Rivai; Muhammad Anwar

doi:10.31849/reila.v4i2.9216

Yusri Yusri Universitas Negeri Makassar, Makassar, Indonesia
Mantasiah Rivai Universitas Negeri Makassar, Makassar, Indonesia
Muhammad Anwar Universitas Negeri Makassar, Makassar, Indonesia

DOI: https://doi.org/10.31849/reila.v4i2.9216

Keywords: Content analysis, Mass trauma, Hoax news, Covid-19, Symbols

Abstract

The hoax has been widely discussed in many studies employing various approaches, and one of the hoaxes massively spread recently is news about COVID-19. This qualitative study aims at investigating the essence of hoax news related to COVID-19 in the Indonesian context using a content analysis approach. The main source of data was 50 hoax news collected from turnbackhoax.com, which is one of the credible anti-hoax news sources in Indonesia. The present study collected the news from 1^st January 2022 until 30^th March 2020. They were then analysed and interpreted qualitatively. The research findings revealed that hoax news circulated during this pandemic era mostly had the purpose of sparking public panic, especially panic buying and panic moving. To trigger such a condition, writers of hoax news frequently used symbols such as time markers (time signals) and quantifiers and involved famous figures. This implies that hoaxes are not only spread during political events or other important occasions but also when most humans in the world experience mass trauma, which in this case is due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Author Biography

Yusri Yusri, Universitas Negeri Makassar, Makassar, Indonesia

Yusri is a senior lecturer at the Universitas Negeri Makassar, Department of Foreign Language Education. His research interest is on applied linguistics, foreign language learning and language politeness. His email contact is [email protected]

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