搜索结果：International journal for the semiotics of law = Revue internationale de semiotique juridique

Being built on the ground of mutual effect, facing the current state-isolation, international law is losing its grip on efficiency. This makes some of us to question (1) If law is not working, do we still need law? If we would say no, the history shows that such is the path to the state-suicide. As Smithian mutual benefits is the assurance of the individual benefits, we need international relationships to create the benefits for the individual states, hence international law, Yet the current one is certainly not working, then, the question, (2) What should the international law be? The enforcement of the international law could be accomplished through the blockchain. As blockchain "went bypass" the national law, and simply negated it, yet it is still not immune to the scope of international jurisdiction. We also argue that the blockchain' smart contract is not sufficient enough to operate smoothly. Human brain is structured as the mirror rather than a glass and transferring the law interpretation to the machine would not work, hence, we designed the formula of langue and parole, blockchain multiseg operating under the semiotics of the international law. Here the language learning is modelled with the supervisory and reinforcing algorithms, with supervisory predetermined with bias X,Y towards the values of law. Sort of form of constant repetends of Heidegger's hermeneutics circle. The most important part in this paper is written with the purpose to explain that international law is at the same struggle that Kafka had. Carrying the weight of both, the clothed façade and true self, first being the morality guide and later the states will, and not being neither, international law is self-isolated from the real world, as Gregor Samsa was. Hence, this is not the paper of secularization, no customs, no higher purpose, nothing except the will of states, that can be constantly renewed with the signifier and signified being linked and re-linked.

On 24th March 2020, the first nationwide complete lockdown was announced by the Prime Minister of India for 21 days which was later extended to 31st May 2020. Consequently, thousands of migrant workers placed in big cities had no other option but to go back to their native villages. Their journeys back to villages- thousands of kilometres on bicycles or foot due to the non-availability of public transport amidst the travel ban- were driven by the compulsions of food and shelter. In one of many heart-wrenching incidents, sixteen laborers were run over by a freight train (all passenger trains in the wake of lockdown had been halted) while they were resting on the railway tracks. The images of the Roti (Indian bread) on the railway track strewn across were beamed on the national news channels, as a telling commentary of the unimaginable hardships of these workers. Ironically, in the eyes of law, they were trespassers under the Indian Railways Act, 1989. The Indian Railway did not pay any compensation to the victims. Their act also violated the Indian Disaster Management Act, 2005 and Indian Penal Code, 1860- the law for the breach of lockdown guidelines and the law for disobedience of order by public servants respectively- for having decided to travel amidst a travel ban. The semiotics of law-making acts 'criminal' bereft of 'moral culpability' are seldom questioned on their supposed amoral foundations. Pandemic exhibited that social fissures not only condition the individual or community actions but also the actions of the State. Minorities especially Muslims were at the receiving end of State's selective enforcement of lockdown laws in India. The various instances in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic expose the hollow claims of equality before the law and the equal protection of laws as a constitutional promise to every citizen. This article aims to unravel the ostensible and the actual moral exhibition of such Indian laws through the lens of several incidents during the nationwide lockdown in India. This paper would argue that this constructed positivist amorality needs to be deconstructed to unearth the power imbalance that it seeks to hide.

COVID-19 pandemic occurred as an unexpected experience affecting all countries around the globe. In addition to the obvious health, economic and political effects, the COVID-19 pandemic triggered immense changes in the social spheres. People and institutions were forced to adjust to the new circumstances, change habits and move most or all of their activity online. In the completely virtual world, pandemic became a fertile ground for the bloom of the conspiracy theories already existing, but struggling for the global attention. The aim of the paper is to present three main conspiracy theories rapidly gaining popularity during the pandemic (the QAnon, anti-vaccination movements and anti-5G movements) and to analyse how they developed since the pandemic had been announced. In particular, the rising activity of the representatives of the movements will be analysed, as well as its acceleration in connection with pandemic and the resulting influence on social and political life. Finally, the paper will try examine whether the rapid development of conspiracy theories within societies has had any relations to the level of trust towards government-made decisions. The thesis being verified hereto is that pandemic accelerated the development of conspiracy theories due to the diminishing level of trust towards governments operating in the most difficult period in recent history. There are variety of reasons for the belief in conspiracy theories and they depend on the specificity of the theory and specificity of group of people it originates from. In general, it can be noted that all kind of conspiracies are developed by either (1) people who actually believe in them and are sharing them with good intentions (to warn other about the dangers hidden behind certain actions or institutions) or (2) malignant individuals whose aim is to discord or discredit an opponent or critic or, alternatively, distract attention from misconduct or lack of competence.

In Fairfax Media Publications Pty Ltd v Voller ('Voller') the Australian High Court held that media companies maintaining Facebook comment pages could be liable for the defamatory posts of commenters on those sites. The decision focussed entirely on whether, by maintaining the Facebook page, the companies had 'published' the statements of commenters. Hearings on other aspects of the tort litigation continue. This paper considers the implications of the tort of defamation on public participation on political will formation where, as is increasingly the case, the participation occurs virtually. Australian law has already tackled the law of defamation as a threat to freedom of political communication; Voller continues the jurisprudence by considering whether hosting an online forum for debate amounts to publication. The more recent High Court judgment in Google LLC v Defteros demonstrated the necessity of the law to align the 'acts' necessary to found legal action with the new environment of automated search engines. The troubled intersection of dematerialised practices of political and cultural discourse and jurisdictionally bound laws of defamation challenges participatory governance as tribes form and dissolve and shift between geographical interests. Defamation in Australia is a tort of strict liability; and, absenting applicable defences, any participation in communication is sufficient to make that participant a publisher and a party to the defamation. The online environment stretches words across geographical and jurisdictional boundaries, but it also stretches and contorts concepts of fault and responsibility. Participatory digital cultural practices integrating users in the creation of cultural heritage simultaneously draw participants into transgressions, both cultural and legal, which are amplified by the medium. Questions of collective guilt, 'shades' of moral responsibility and disproportionality between blameworthiness and legal liability challenge laws formulated for the printing press but now deployed in the online environment. In this way the digitized participatory environment presents deep challenges to law and legal systems, which are chained to geography. This paper considers the concept of innocent publication in the context of the digitized participatory environment and the way in which the virtual experience is dissolving concepts of geographically defined jurisdictions.

What is viral law? In order to being my discussion, I note that the last two years have been extremely difficult to understand and that we, meaning those who have lived through the pandemic, have struggled to make sense. Thus, I make the argument that the virus has impacted upon not only the individual's ability to make sense in a world where every day routines have been upended, but also social and political structures that similarly rely on repetition to continue to function. According to this thesis, Covid-19 is more than simply a biological organism, but also a cultural virus that undermines the organisation of social, political, and economic systems and requires new ways of thinking about how we might move forward into a post-Covid world. In the name of beginning this project of making sense of Covid-19, I track back in history to the comparable reference point of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1920 and, in particular, a reading of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which the founder of psychoanalysis wrote in the shadow of the virus. In reading Freud's attempt to write a psychology of death in the context of this funereal period of history, I argue that he set out first, a mythological theory of viral law concerned with the death drive, before turning to second, a techno-scientific, biological theory of the same (viral) law characterised by microbial immortality. Beyond this exploration of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in the third part of the article I turn to a reading of Lacan's interpretation of Freud's work, where viral law becomes a story of cybernetics and nihilistic mechanisation. Here, perfect mechanisation, and the endless oscillation between message and noise, looks a lot like living death. Finally, I take up Derrida's critique of Jacob's molecular biology and, by extension, Freud's theory of microbial immorality, that he thinks privileges an idea of repetitive sameness and opens up a space for cultural politics concerned with immunity against otherness. Derrida's key point here is that this biological fantasy ignores the reality of viral sex that enables evolution to happen. What this means is that the other, even in its microbial form, is ever present, and that we must recognise the importance of difference to the possibility of social, political, and economic change.

Since early 2020, the Covid-19 (CoronaVIrus Disease-19) pandemic has affected our world in multiple ways. What we know and how we know it has shifted on a global scale. How we move throughout the world has been restricted and locked down. How we see one another has changed the cultural narrative in numerous countries throughout the world. As we seek to rid ourselves of the novel coronavirus infecting our everyday, three significant paradigm shifts have mutated our realities and imaginaries in which we dwell. With millions dead or sickened by the evolving Covid-19 virus (According to the World Health Organization, "Globally, as of 8:32 pm CET, 9 February 2022, there have been 399,600,607 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 5,757,562 deaths, reported to WHO. As of 7 February 2022, a total of 10,095,615,243 vaccine doses have been administered." Source: https://covid19.who.int; Accessed Feb 9, 2022.), we are a different world now than we were. As guest editors for this Special Issue, (In)Visible Mutations of the (Mis)Information Imaginary: Knowledge, Movement, and Cultural Discourse in the Wake of Covid-19, we pay tribute to the millions affected by these changes by offering this collection of scholarship as a critical path forward. We examine three primary areas in which life, law, and legality have mutated with results that demand our immediate attention. The first section of contributing articles, Knowledge, engages with the dissemination of knowledge and (mis)information as either fact or fiction in lexicons and media outlets throughout the world. The second section, Movement, focuses on aspects of motion and its restriction in terms of bodies, legislation, access, and the threat of viral contamination across borders and within communities. The third section, Cultural Discourse, considers the (in)visibility of viral spread ranging from masks that cover the face to the separation of bodies through social distancing to the politicization of religion and vaccination. What once were normative cultural positionalities of space and politics have been volatized by institutionalized risk reduction and the confrontation of the unknown in the tenuous unforeseeable realm we now globally inhabit: L'idée se fait jour qu'il s'agit au moins autant d'une syndémie que d'une pandémie. Alors que la pandémie est une épidémie qui touche une partie importante de la population mondiale, une syndémie caractérise un entrelacement de maladie, de facteurs biologiques et environnementaux qui, par leur synergie, aggravent les conséquences de ces maladies sur la population. Ost F (De quoi le Covid est-il le nom ? Académie Royale de Belgique, Bruxelles, 2021, p. 6). We hope that this Special Issue helps to contribute as a vital source of critical engagement with the effects of the new pandemic lexicon and re-emerging, yet irrevocably mutated public and private spaces and relationships to each another.

The aim of this article is to present some of the results of empirical research on the communication process at a trial conducted in Polish courts. These results will concern the participation of non-professional participants of a trial and the ways in which they deal with the communication process in the courtroom. The article presents the results of the analysis of the research material conducted in accordance with the detailed research questions and analytical categories. The analysis has especially shown that: (1) the non-professional participants used some legal terminology, but the statements without legal terminology were also communicatively effective; (2) the level of activity of non-professional participants related to participation at the trial varied depending on what the activity concerned; the activity in asking questions to the presiding judges regarding legal issues and the course of the court proceedings appeared to be significant; (3) the non-professional participants' had a real and significant problem with asking questions during the examination (the proper realization of this element of the trial); (4) the statements of the non-professional participants of a trial were very protective; they used many different "linguistic means of protection" (e.g., acts of supposition or acts of doubt) which are connected with the obligation to tell the truth, the prohibition of concealing the truth and giving false testimony during examination; (5) the non-professional participants of a trial reach for adequate argumentative acts, which are suitable for influencing the perception of specific events or persons, and they strengthen their statements by using appropriate linguistic means of persuasion.

The beginning of the twenty-first century saw an apparent change in language in public discourses characterised by the rise of so-called "essentially oxymoronic concepts", i.e., mainly oxymora and paradoxes. In earlier times, these rhetorical figures of speech were largely reserved for the domain of literature, the arts or mysticism. Today, however, many new technologies and other innovations are contributing to their rise also in the domains of science and of law. Particularly in law, their inherent contradictory quality of combining apparently antagonistic suppositions challenges the traditional dualistic mode of reasoning and binary logic. As reflected in terms like fake news, alternative facts or conspiracy theories, these concepts are seen as a threat to the rule of law and legal certainty and have been described as harbingers of an age of disinformation or post-truth. The challenge posed by these apparently contradictory concepts requires a closer look at the premises that guide our legal thinking and a more integrated theory of the senses and their role in law, as captured by the terms "legal synaesthesia" and "legal semiotics". It also calls for an inquiry into the mind's functioning generally and how it processes information in the creative process of decision making, linking thoughts and actions as well as facts and fictions. Based on the qualification of "fake news" as an oxymoron, this article critically examines the deficiencies in a dichotomous distinction between fact and fiction exemplified by information about the pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) in an attempt to clarify the principal issues for a global regulatory debate regarding "fake news".

In May, 2016 the Diet passed a law on the "Promotion of efforts to eliminate unfair discriminatory speech and behaviour against people originating from outside Japan", widely referred to as ヘイトスピーチ (Heito Supiichi Hō /Hate Speech Law). For some residents of Japan it had been a long time coming. Without any laws specifically prohibiting racially discriminatory speech or writing, aggrieved parties had hitherto been forced to resort to indirect lines of protection. In 1999, for example, a Brazilian national ejected from a jewelry shop displaying a poster saying "No foreigners allowed" obtained a favourable ruling citing Japan's ratification of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination; and in 2013 an injunction for defamation and obstruction of business was granted on behalf of a school for children of North Korean descent repeatedly subjected to provocative demonstrations. But others questioned the need to reinforce limits on freedom of expression even in the face of aggressive taunts, with some claiming that incidents of racial discrimination in Japan lacked the historical, entrenched and violent dimensions that had prompted hate speech laws in Europe and elsewhere. When the text of the proposed law became public there was also debate about its utility as such an abstract measure seemed inapplicable to many potential victims and lacked punitive sanctions. Against this criticism it could be argued that the law went about as far as the government could expect to go if it were to get it passed; that it appears to be curtailing a particularly aggressive form of hate speech; and that it has ushered in a number of more specific initiatives, especially at local level. This study will begin with the 2016 text itself, drawing on the semiotic framework of Systemic Functional Grammar to explore how it prioritises general principles over specific regulations. This textual analysis will be followed by a contextual account of why the Law was constructed as it was, how it has influenced awareness of hate speech, and where it fits in with an existing genre of non-coercive legislation in Japan. The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11196-022-09883-9.

Can the pandemic measures be used to advance particular political means? The question of correlation between illiberal legal changes adopted amongst the wave of legislation focused on battling COVID has arisen in a number of countries around the world; as an increasing number of states finds leaving restrictions behind in 2022, however, Hong Kong is still battling the Omicron wave of the pandemic. Ever since its transition to China in 1997, Hong Kong has retained its place on the world stage as an international business hub and, while getting closer to the Mainland, enjoyed the freedoms provided by its SAR status. At the same time, by the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century the tensions between the pro-democratic inclinations of the large part of the city's population and pro-Mainland disposition of the SAR's political elite began to rise, with proposals of various legal acts put forward by the local government often perceived as encroaching freedoms. The street-level 'standoff' between the authorities and the people was brought to a halt by the COVID-19 pandemic; and, with protesting rendered virtually impossible, a number of controversial legal changes were introduced by the government taking advantage of the situation, which, together with the anti-pandemic measures have continued to negatively impact the city's financial hub status. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the correlation between Hong Kong's fight with the pandemic and the local government's taking advantage of the situation in order to implement illiberal legislation, and its aftermath.

This contribution focuses on legal issues raised by the audiovisual broadcasting of performing arts, which has significantly increased due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. First, we contextualize this practice and briefly present the emergence and evolution of the practice of "filmed theater", as well as any other form of performances (e.g., concert, ballet, opera) originally conceived for the stage but subsequently diffused through other channels. Secondly, we address the current legal issues that have arisen because of the increase of such practice due to the containment measures taken by government. Two axes are of particular attention: the matter of copyrights and related rights, on the one hand, and the question of public financing, on the other. Concerning intellectual property, audiovisual broadcasting leads to several legal consequences and issues: effectiveness of related rights, emergence of new modes of exploitation and new authors, recognition of the recording as an original work, etc. This new practice is, moreover, likely to disrupt the categories established by public funding legal mechanisms, which are often poorly adapted to hybrid artistic objects. The objective of this part is therefore to analyze the new legal issues raised by the audiovisual distribution of performances. Finally, we go beyond exclusively legal issues to examine the very specificities of performing arts and, more specifically, the possible loss that would result from a fixation of a production on a reproducible medium, making its diffusion possible beyond the stage.

March 2020 has become a moment of change in communication mode and quality. Previously, the media paid attention to the current affairs, however, never earlier the journalistic discourse has been so influentially affected by the ongoing phenomenon as in the case of COVID-19. Almost overnight the new terminological phenomena with specific legal or medical reference were introduced into everyday language mainly via mass media and become an important part of a pandemic related narration. The strong influence on the shape of the mentioned linguistic changes has mainly the adoption of new legal regulations due to the unexpected outbreak of the pandemic. The aim of the following paper is to investigate how COVID-19 pandemic affected the specialisation of the journalistic discourse and how different domains (law, medicine) are being influenced by new terminology and in other way round, how for example law and medicine influence new "COVID language". In order to take the interdisciplinary nature of the issue into account, the degree of hybridity of the selected texts will be examined by means of selected material analysis. The methodology applied in the paper uses an empirical approach and comparative analysis. The material used for the analysis comes from the selected Polish quality and boulevard press. The paper concerns the linguistic influence of the "invisible enemy" on the language presented in press. The main findings reveal the intense use of neologisms, borrowings, and it shows that the discourse was changed linguistically thanks to Student's t-test.

This paper aims to perform a multi-level analysis of the Irish public discourse on Covid-19. Despite widespread agreement that Ireland's response was rapid and effective, the country's journey through the pandemic has been no easy ride. In order to contain the virus, the Government's emergency legislation imposed draconian measures including the detention and isolation of people deemed to be even "a potential source of infection" and a significant extension of An Garda Síochána's power of arrest. In April 2020, journalists John Waters and Gemma O'Doherty initiated judicial review proceedings before the High Court to challenge such legislation, which they defined as unconstitutional, "disproportionate" and based on "fraudulent science". The proceedings attracted widespread media coverage in what soon became a debate on the legitimacy of emergency legislation and the notion of 'fake news' itself. After a brief survey of the legislative background to Ireland's Covid response, the argumentative strategy is analysed through which the High Court eventually dismissed Mr Waters and Ms O'Doherty's challenge. Focusing on the process of justification of the judicial decision, the paper provides a descriptive account of the argument structure of the Court's decision. This sheds light on the pattern of multiple argumentation through which the Court interpreted relevant norms in the Constitution and at once re-established the primacy of "facts" informing political decision-making at a time of national emergency.

This article aims to contribute to scholarship regarding the critique of rights through the examination of the role of rights discourse in the furtherance of what is generally termed 'community organising'-in particular, tenant organising-in the social and political context of neoliberalism. Conceptions of neoliberalism advanced in the work of David Harvey, Michel Foucault, Wendy Brown, and Bonnie Honig are synthesised to explicate the material and discursive role of law in the maintenance and furtherance of the neoliberal project. The article assesses the left-legal critique of rights presented primarily through the Critical Legal Studies Movement alongside the role of legal practice and legal discourse in countering neoliberalism. The article argues that rights claims concerning collective organisation, such as those commonly afforded to workers and trade unions, present a unique exception to the left-legal critique of rights in providing the means by which oppressive social relations may not only be remedies, but overcome. The works of Chantal Mouffe and of Roberto Unger are instructive in this regard and are placed in conversation with theories of community and labour organising. The article concludes by sketching the application of this conception of organising rights to the problem of housing and tenants' rights under neoliberalism.

Fake news is created as ordinary news stylistically but it consists of deliberate disinformation or hoaxes (aimed at misinforming or deceiving people). The text is generally constructed to cause negative emotions and feelings in readers: fear, panic, distrust, and paranoia. It is done to manipulate the opinion and consciousness of a large number of people and eventually leads to changes in the values, ideas and attitudes that already exist in the public awareness. The result is a schism that has already gone beyond the usual spiritual strife. Moreover, its expansion has weakened the defining feature of Russian Orthodoxy which lies in trust and support of the state and authorities. The Russian Orthodox Church has to deal not only with public health crisis but also with profound differences within its ranks over the churchgoers' behavior in the conditions of a pandemic. The article analyzes legal regulations and mechanisms for countering fake news about the Russian Orthodox Church, and provides examples from the judicial practice. It also determines the mechanisms of the worshippers' reaction to the fake news involving the Russian Orthodox Church. Using semiotic methodology, the author reveals re-encoding of the symbolic meaning of such signs as "Russian Orthodox cross" and "red cross". The connotative meaning of these signs leads to contradictions in the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Freedom of expression is a fundamental part of living in a free and open society and, above all, a basic need of every human being and a requirement to attain happiness. Its absence has relevant consequences, not only for individuals but also for the whole social community. This might explain why freedom of expression was, along with other freedoms (conscience and religion; thought, belief, opinion, including that of the press and other media of communication; peaceful assembly; and association), at the core of liberal constitutionalism, and constitutes, since the Second World War, an essential element of constitutional democracies. In a democracy, people should be allowed to express themselves to others freely. The paper, which is divided into five sections, points out that states are obliged to protect the exercise of that freedom not only because its very purpose is the common good and welfare of society but also because it is a requirement of any constitutional democracy. Otherwise, when people cannot express themselves, perhaps out of fear (not from 'war' but from different kinds of social pressure or 'violence' exerted by some lobbies, mass media, or governmental policies that are at odds with respect for the plurality of opinions), vulnerability arises. This weakens not only those individuals that are not allowed to express their thoughts but also those who do not dare to do it - or even not to think for themselves - under certain environmental pressures (exerted by states, international organizations, social media, or financial groups, lobbies, etc.). In the end, the decline of freedom of expression makes most people more vulnerable and jeopardizes the whole democratic system.

In this essay both the facts/values and facticity/normativity divides are considered from the perspective of global semiotics and with specific regard to the relationships between legal meaning and spatial scope of law's experience. Through an examination of the inner and genetic projective significance of categorization, I will analyze the semantic dynamics of the descriptive parts comprising legal sentences in order to show the intermingling of factual and axiological/teleological categorizations in the unfolding of legal experience. Subsequently, I will emphasize the translational and enactive cognitive disposition underlying the construction of the second premise of the so-called judiciary syllogism and thereby the untenability of the idea that 'law makes its facts.' Hence, I will try to bring to the fore the cultural pre-assumptions encapsulated in the positivistic and therefore also formalistic or analytical approaches to legal experience and the loss of their inner consistency when legal experience confronts the phases and major changes of global semiotics. Finally, I will strive to relativize the opposition between the positivist and non-positivistic theories of law in view of an understanding of legal experience focused not only, or at least not primarily, on what 'law is' but also on 'how' it unwinds through, and in spite of, environmental and semantic transformations.

This paper argues that while regulatory frameworks in aged care authorise restraints to protect vulnerable persons living with dementia from harm, they also serve as normalising practices to control challenging monstrous Others. This argument emerges out of an observed unease in aged care discourse where older people living with dementia are described as 'vulnerable', while dementia behaviours are described as 'challenging'. Using narrative analysis on a case study from the Final Report of the Australian Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety (RCAC), this paper investigates how the RCAC (re)produced constructions of persons with dementia as 'vulnerable monsters'. Drawing upon monstrous theory about 'unruly and leaky' bodies, extracts from the case study reveal how the RCAC repeated and reinforced monstrous constructions of dementia. Dementia behaviours, particularly 'wandering', were constructed through a dehumanising crisis frame that produced 'challenging' bodies and legitimised 'last resort' normalising practices, such as physical and chemical restraints. In failing to resist monstrous constructions of dementia behaviours, the RCAC accepted and authorised a regime of scaled responses leading to restrictive practices for control of challenging bodies in aged care. Although dementia care and restrictive practices received substantial attention in the RCAC, this paper reveals a missed opportunity for deeper review of institutionalised use of restraints that has relevance for ongoing reform of Australian aged care following conclusion of the RCAC.

Focusing on media discourse and adopting a Critical Discourse Analysis-linguistic and rhetorical-perspective, this paper explores the role of the media in influencing citizens' behaviour towards the COVID-19 crisis. The paper evaluates the set of potentially persuasive lexical items and emotional implicatures used by two quality newspapers, i.e. The Guardian (UK edition) and El País (Spain edition), to report on the pandemic during the three waves-the periods between the onset and trough of virus contamination-that occurred until March 2021. A representative, ad-hoc, comparable corpus (COVIDWave_EN and COVIDWave_ES) was compiled in English and Spanish comprising the news on the pandemic that appeared in the aforementioned newspapers during the three established time periods. The corpora were uploaded to Sketch Engine, which was used to first detect and analyse different categories (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) of word frequency, and then assign negative or positive polarity. Lexical keyness was secondly analysed to categorize emotional implicatures of control, metaphors, signals of epistemic asymmetry and positive implicatures in order to discern how they become weapons of negative or positive persuasion. The ultimate end of the study was to critically analyse and contrast the lexicon and rhetoric used by these two newspapers during this time period so as to unveil the stance taken by governments and health institutions-voices of authority-to disseminate words of control and persuasion with the aim of exerting influence on the behaviour of citizens in UK and Spain. The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11196-021-09869-z.