THE CASE OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC HOAX: AN OVERVIEW OF FORENSIC LINGUISTICS

Abstract

This research focused on forensic Linguistic Review which discussed about hoax case of Covid-19 pandemic circulated in social media. The purpose of this research is to describe the category of Covid-19 hoaxes and to analyze the linguistics’ characteristic of language wickedness’ case which is hoax case of Covid-19 pandemic. The date in this research was gained by the official website of the Ministry of Communications and Informatics. The techniques of data collection were documentation technique, reading technique, and notepad technique. The process of data analysis to describe the category of Covid-19 hoaxes were data identification based on theoretical comprehension of hoax cases and legislation-based-law comprehension. Meanwhile, in processes of linguistics’ characteristic analysis on the hoax case of Covid-19 pandemic were semantics approach, syntax and Halliday context theory. The result of this research found that there are two categories on hoax case of Covid-19 pandemic which were circulating in social media, namely hoax cases caused by misinformation and hoax cases caused by disinformation. The linguistics’ characteristic that became the sign of lies are 1) the using of vocabulary and diction; 2) the sentence structure in the hoax case text; 3) the context analysis which includes the fact and the goals of the perpetrators.