Building Critical Awareness of Corona Virus-Related News: Cyber-Pragmatic Study of Covid-19 Hoaxes on Social Media

Abstract

The New Coronavirus disease, referred to by the World Health Organization (WHO) as Covid-19, has now become the world pandemic. Grave concern over the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic is not only felt by the government, but also by all Indonesian citizens without exception. However, not all Indonesian citizens seemed to feel this concern. A number of people even spread hoaxes related to Covid-19. This led to the cyber-pragmatics research on Covid-19 hoaxes to describe the conventional external contexts and virtual external contexts. The main objective of this cyber-pragmatics research is to build critical awareness of Indonesian citizens so that they can interpret the utterances in the text related to the Covid-19 pandemic correctly. The forms of hoaxes and the intent of Covid-19 hoax are described in such detail that people are increasingly aware that hoaxes are not true and conflict with the intrinsic functions of language itself. This research aims to raise the community critical awareness in order to interpret the rampant hoaxes in their daily life. The research problem in the perspective of cyber-pragmatics is: What are the manifestations and intentions of Covid-19 seen from the perspective of cyber-pragmatics found in social media? Hence, the research objective is to: describe the manifestation and intentions of Covid-19 in the perspective of cyber-pragmatics found in social media. Furthermore, the main objective of this research is to build critical awareness to understand coronavirus-related news. From the analysis of the data, the researcher found the pragmatic meanings of Covid-19 hoax as follows: (1) insinuation; (2) insult; (3) questioning; (4) blaming; (5) degrading; (6) rumors; (7) agitation.