A Study Of Identifying Deceptive Information In Drug Advertisements From The Perspective Of Memetics

As an infamous medium abused by illegal dealers to propagate their fake drugs,deceptive drug advertisements mislead consumers, and exert substantial ramifications on people’s life, and some fake drugs even cause death. Confronted with such a social phenomenon and inspired by the concept of malignant meme proposed by Blackmore,the author intends to study the mechanism of deception in drug advertisements by means of analyzing the linguistic patterns from a memetic perspective, aiming to provide a new insight into deceptive information research.The present study is a qualitative analysis, in which the author analyzes ten illegal drug commercials that are transcribed. First of all, the author categorizes the linguistic features of such advertisements based on memetics. In the meantime, a statistical analysis of the questionnaires is carried out to scrutinize the influence of malignant memes on consumers’ behaviors, i.e. whether they will be deceived by the malignant memes. Finally, under the guidance of adaptation theory, the typical information strategies are explored, and the causes of deception in drug advertisements are expounded accordingly.It is found that 17 types of malignant memes transmitted in genotype and phenotype and five types of information strategies catering for people’s communicative contexts are widely employed in deceptive drug advertisements. In addition, the present study finds that consumer’s age is an important variable to decide the infectious power of malignant memes in drug advertisements, which indicates that people over 50 years old are more likely to be deceived.The findings of the paper will contribute to the further research on malignant memes, help prevent the deceptive information in drug advertisements from being spread in an effective way, and then provide consumers with guidance on identifying deceptive drug advertisements, thus curbing the risk of being deceived.