Manipulation and persuasion in selected chain e-mails

Abstract

The authors in this paper pay attention to the current phenomenon of chain e-mails which contain misleading or manipulative content. Chain e-mails affect a large number of people especially the older generation. The aim of this paper is to explain this phenomenon based on our research and to describe the content of e-mails using critical discourse analysis. We used both quantitative and qualitative methods. Our analysis is based on our own corpus of chain e-mails created from an online database by the Čeští Elfové movement. The on-line text analysis tool Sketch Engine was used for quantitative analysis, in which we used KeyWords, Collocations, Wordlist and Concordations functions. The qualitative part included the analysis of one selected chain e-mail from our corpus. Among the many topics that the chain e-mails cover, we focused on the reflection of the Vrbětice case. This case concerns the accusation of the Russian intelligent services of participation in the explosion of two ammunition warehouses in Vrbetice in 2014. As part of the analysis, we mainly focused on how the two worlds of “us” versus “them” are constructed in e-mail and what evaluations and attributes are assigned to individual event participants.