Can we trust social media influencers?: Persuasion and manipulation strategies of social media influencers

TRABAJO DE FIN DE GRADO

«Can we trust social media influencers?:
Persuasion and manipulation strategies of
 social media influencers»

 Autora: ANA RODRÍGUEZ DOMÍNGUEZ

 Tutora: DRA. BÁRBARA EIZAGA REBOLLAR

 GRADO EN ESTUDIOS INGLESES
 Curso Académico 2020/2021

 Fecha de presentación 25/05/2021

 FACULTAD DE FILOSOFÍA Y LETRAS

Index:

Abstract …………………………………………………………...................................2

1. Introduction …………………………………………………….................................3

2. Persuasion ……………………………………………………………………………5

 2.1. What is persuasion? …………………………..............................................5

 2.2. Persuasion techniques …………………………………………….............6
 2.2.1. Credibility techniques (ethos)………………………………………….6
 2.2.2. Emotional techniques (pathos)………………………………………...8
 2.2.3. Logical-Argumentative techniques (logos)……………………………8

3. Manipulation ………………………………………………………………….........11

 3.1. What is manipulation?................................................................................11
 3.2. Manipulation techniques ……………………………………………........12

4. Relevance theory …………………………………………………………………...15

 4.1. Informative and communicative intention ……………………………...16
 4.2. Overt communication …………………………………………………….17
 4.3. Covert communication …………………………………………………...18

5. Analysis of female influencers discourse …………………………………………..19

 5.1. Corpus: influencers, publications, and videos selected …………………19

 5.2. Analysis of the influencers on Instagram………………………………..19
 5.2.1. Discourse analysis of the consolidated influencer on Instagram …..20
 5.2.2. Discourse analysis of the unconsolidated influencer on Instagram...22

 5.3. Analysis of the influencers on YouTube………………………………….26
 5.3.1. Discourse analysis of the consolidated influencer on YouTube ….....26
 5.3.2 Discourse analysis of the unconsolidated influencer on YouTube…..28

6. Discussion: obtained results in the analysis ………………………………….........31

7. Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………..33

8. References …………………………………………………………………………..34

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ABSTRACT

In a very short period of time, social media has become part of our lives and we are very used to seeing
numerous influencers doing marketing when we surf the networks. To my mind, it is a very interesting
topic to comment on since there is little information about the work that influencers do on social media,
and, therefore, it can be complicated to understand what they focus on to achieve success on these platforms.
The main purpose of this research is to analyze the discourse both consolidated and unconsolidated female
influencers use on social media as a marketing strategy when they try to persuade and/or manipulate their
target audience. To do so, I have analyzed the persuasion and/or manipulation strategies and the type of –
overt or covert – communication that influencers use on social media following Relevance Theory. The
results of this study challenge the argument that influencers only persuade and seek benefits for both
themselves and their target audience, as they also manipulate them to benefit themselves easily, turning
themselves into manipulators instead of persuaders.

Keywords: persuasion, manipulation, marketing strategies, social media, influencers

RESUMEN

En un periodo muy corto de tiempo, las redes sociales han pasado a formar parte de nuestras vidas y estamos
muy acostumbrados a ver numerosas ‘influencers’ haciendo marketing cuando navegamos por las redes.
En mi opinión, es un tema bastante interesante de comentar ya que existe muy poca información sobre el
trabajo que las ‘influencers’ realizan en las redes, y, por tanto, puede ser complicado entender en qué se
centran para que su trabajo en las redes sea exitoso. El principal objetivo de este trabajo es analizar el
discurso que las influencers femeninas consolidadas y no consolidadas usan en las redes sociaes como
estrategia de marketing cuando intentan persuadir y/o manipular al público objetivo. Para ello, he analizado
las estrategias de persuasión y/o manipulación y el tipo de comunicación (abierta o encubierta) que utilizan
las ‘influencers’ en las redes sociales siguiendo la Teoría de Relevancia. Los resultados de este studio
desafían el argumento de que las ‘influencers’ solo persuaden y buscan beneficios propios y para su público
objetivo, ya que estas lo manipulan también para beneficiarse fácilmente, convirtiéndose en manipuladoras
en lugar de persuasoras.

Palabras claves: persuasión, manipulación, estrategias de marketing, redes sociales,
‘influencers’.

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INTRODUCTION

The reason why I chose this idea for my final year project was the lack of information
about the work that influencers do on social media. We tend to think that they use social
medial as a hobby, but many times we forget that they work for marketing companies to
make their living. Considered a more “enjoyable” job than others, many individuals
become consolidated influencers. However, this is not an easy task since it requires
practice and knowledge of how to deal with and manage a target audience. Therefore, I
have decided to investigate this topic further and analyze the persuasion and/or
manipulation strategies influencers use in their discourse and the type of (overt or covert)
communication they use, consciously or unconsciously, on social media to market their
products – whether they are telling personal stories, promoting a brand, or even
themselves.
 Persuasive and manipulative discourses as well as the overt and covert
communication employed have previously been studied (Cialdini, 2001; Saussure, 2005;
Yus, 2006). Nevertheless, since social networks are such a current topic, I have not found
many papers or books on persuasion and manipulation in social networks. I will apply
Relevance Theory to the analysis of social networks to explain how communication in
this media works, together with the persuasion and manipulation strategies proposed by
other authors.
 Bearing in mind the few studies carried out by some researchers, I will try to solve
the following research problem: many actual marketing companies use social networks
to promote their products, persuading or manipulating the public to consume them,
through consolidated and not-so-consolidated influencers and, thus, obtaining benefits for
both the company and the influencer. Hence, for persuasion or manipulation to take place,
influencers must consider certain aspects and avoid others in the discourse they use in
their social media. This research problem raises the following research questions (RQs)
that will be addressed in this study:

 1. Which persuasion and/or manipulation strategies are used by consolidated
 influencers, hired by marketing companies to promote or sell their products?
 2. Which of the persuasion and/or manipulation strategies are used by
 unconsolidated influencers who want to attract as many followers as possible to
 get the attention of brands?
 3. What type of (overt or covert) communication do consolidated influencers use
 when they promote their products?
 4. What type of (overt or covert) communication do unconsolidated influencers use
 when they do marketing?
 5. Do consolidated influencers use the same persuasion and/or manipulation
 strategies on Instagram and YouTube?
 6. Do unconsolidated influencers use the same persuasion and/or manipulation
 strategies on Instagram and YouTube?
Therefore, the goals of this final year project are the following:

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1. To identify which persuasion and/or manipulation strategies use consolidated
 influencers to promote companies’ products or brands,
 2. To identify which persuasion and/or manipulation strategies unconsolidated influencers
 use to attract many followers to get the attention of brands,
 3. To analyze the type of (overt or covert) communication that consolidated and
 unconsolidated influencers use when they promote their products,
 4. To analyze the type of (overt or covert) communication that unconsolidated influencers
 use when they do marketing,
 5. To examine if consolidated ‘influencers’ from Instagram use the same persuasion and/or
 manipulation strategies as consolidated and unconsolidated ‘influencers’ from YouTube.
 6. To examine if unconsolidated ‘influencers’ from Instagram use the same persuasion
 and/or manipulation strategies as consolidated and unconsolidated ‘influencers’ from
 YouTube.

 For each research question and goal of this study, I have made the following
hypotheses:

 1. Consolidated influencers use persuasion strategies to promote and sell more
 brands’ products.
 2. Unconsolidated influencers mostly use manipulation strategies concealing their
 communicative intention to easily attract more followers.
 3. Consolidated influencers use overt communication to promote their products.
 4. Unconsolidated influencers use covert communication to attract more followers.
 5. Consolidated influencers use different persuasion and/or manipulation strategies
 on Instagram and YouTube.
 6. Unconsolidated influencers use different persuasion and/or manipulation
 strategies on Instagram and YouTube.

 In Section 2, I define persuasion and the persuasion strategies. Section 3 provides
some definitions of manipulation and revises the manipulation strategies. In Section 4, I
explain the concepts of Relevance Theory to be used in the social media analysis, i.e. the
concepts of communicative and informative intentions, and how these intentions relate to
overt and covert communication. Section 5 checks if the theoretical concepts already
discussed can be applied to the discourse of consolidated and unconsolidated female
influencers on two different social networks, Instagram and YouTube. In Section 6, the
results of the analysis are discussed and interpreted. Finally, Section 7 is the conclusion
of this study.

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2. Persuasion

2.1. What is persuasion?

Nowadays, according to many scholars such as Gifu & Teodorescu (2014) and Taillard
(2002), all communication is persuasive as it is always communicated with the intention
of obtaining an effect on the addressee. As Taillard (2000) argues, persuasive
communication has two purposes: to be understood and to be believed; the former should
occur in pragmatics and the latter in social psychology. Thus, it is important to define the
concept of persuasion itself. When we talk about persuasion, the term probably is related
with the notion ‘perlocutionary force’, which says that “a sentence has to affect other
people’s actions and attitude” (Arai, 2007: 4). However, many different scholars have
defined the notion of persuasion in different ways. To my mind, the most appropriate one
is that of Perloff (2003: 8), who defines it as: “…a symbolic process in which
communicators try to convince other people to change their attitudes or behaviors
regarding an issue”. In other words, persuasion is based on just trying to convince others
to change their attitudes on something, but it would be necessary to consider that
addressees are always going to be able to decide if they want to have their attitude
changed.
 However, we must not forget that, for communication to be persuasive, the speech
must be intentional and needs to be fulfilled successfully, as O’Keefe (2002: 5) states:
“Persuasion is a successful intentional effort at influencing another’s mental state through
communication in a circumstance in which the persuade has some measure of freedom”.
Therefore, persuading involves convincing others about the importance of the goals we
propose them to pursue (Vincze, 2009: 187). Thus, we find that there is a certain
relationship between the persuasive discourse and the Jakobsonian communication
model, as Fuentes-Olivera et al. explains in (2001: 1293), since there is a communicator
or addresser, who would be the persuader, a persuaded addressee, a reality, a channel, a
code and a message or text.1
 Besides intention, in persuasion, it is fundamental to consider that an individual
must have a “concern for public interest” (Mautz, 1988: 122). Hence, the previous study
of the interests of most public to whom the persuasive speech is addressed would imply
a greater probability of its success. It would be necessary to follow the Waltonian model2
to know all those preferences of the public before persuading it. If the persuader studies
previously the commitments of the addressee, and they3 “change their point of view or

 1
 In Fuentes-Olivera et al. (2001), the Jakobsonian communication model is adapted to the discourse
 of advertising. Hence, “reality” is considered to be the product or service; “channel” that corresponds
 to the way in which the message is transmitted: written, spoken, or digital; “code” refers to the
 language, images and sounds used in the communicative act; “message” or “text” refers to the
 advertisements part of an advertising campaign; “addresser” is the role the advertiser has; and
 “addressee” is the role embodied by the target audience. (pp. 1293)
 2
 In the Waltonian model alludes the term “commitment” is defined as “the state of being obligated of
 bound (as by intellectual conviction or emotional ties” (Walton 1995: 14). In short, it studies how to
 intellectually or emotionally involve the audience to successfully carry out persuasion.
 3
 I will use the pronouns “they”, “them” and “themselves”, and the determiner “their” to refer to the
 persuader throughout this study with a singular meaning.

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their stance towards the opponent’s thesis at the end of the dialogue, then persuasion is
evaluated as successful for the proponent” (Debowska-Kozlowska, 2014: 328).
Otherwise, persuasion would be considered unsuccessful.

2.2. Persuasion techniques

In persuasive communication, various techniques and strategies are used to make the
arguments effective and convincing. In other words, they are employed in persuasive
discourse for the persuader and the persuaded to obtain benefits, and every individual
must use them to get success in his or her persuasive discourse. According to Gifu &
Teodorescu (2014: 22), “persuasion techniques are designed to “sell”, product, idea,
concept, suggests…”. This study focuses on Aristotle’s (2004) three technical means of
persuasion – three different techniques which should be used to persuade –: technical
means of persuasion in the character of the addresser (ethos), in the emotional state of the
hearer (pathos) and in the argument (logos) itself.

2.2.1. Credibility Techniques (ethos)

As Varpio states (2018: 207), the term ‘ethos’ is related to the character of the persuader,
including how much trustworthy they are. The persuader has to portray themselves as a
reliable individual to get the trust of the addressee. Gifu & Teodorescu claim that
“persuasion is performed by a character whenever the discourse is held in such a way as
to render the speaker worthy of credence” (2014: 19). That is to say, to be trustworthy
person, the persuader needs first to show themselves as an intelligent and virtuous person
with good will, for which they will need to use a series of strategies. These strategies are
employed to make the addresser think on the credibility of their own persuasive discourse,
concluding that what is said is true or acceptable. There are six main techniques that the
persuader should consider (Cialdini, 2001; Gifu & Teodorescu, 2014):

 - Reciprocity: if persuaders use this technique in their persuasive discourse to
 influence certain individuals, they must keep in mind what their main objective is
 and what they want from the addressees. Then, they must detect what they should
 give them in return. In few words, they must treat others as they treat them.

 - Commitment: persuaders must be consistent with their beliefs, and actions. That
 is the reason why it is required to commit oneself to clear and fixed ideas to be
 consistent with them until the end.

 - Social Proof: Cialdini and Gifu & Teodorescu state:

 “The tendency to see an action as more appropriate when others are doing it normally
 works quite well. As a rule, we will make fewer mistakes by acting in accord with social
 evidence than contrary to it. Usually, when a lot of people are doing something, it is the
 right thing to do.” (2007: 88).

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For instance, if persuaders try to sell something, they highlight the number of
 people who make use of it, and publish cases of clients satisfied with it and
 encourage people to promote it on their social media, so the success likelihood
 will be higher. Then, the social proof will be that many people are using the
 product and are satisfied with it.

- Liking: whether the persuader shows them as a confident person and knows
 profoundly about the topic they are going to talk about, the audience to whom the
 persuasive speech is addressed to will like it, so it reveals that the persuader is,
 apart from reliable, kind, thoughtful and humane. Gifu & Teodorescu (2014: 24),
 assert that for the persuader to generate sympathy in the public, they need to
 consider certain aspects:

 o Physical attractiveness: for causing a good impression among the public,
 the persuader must retract them as a talented, kind and intelligent person;
 o Similarity: it is about studying the likes and preferences of most of the
 audience to whom the persuasive speech is addressed to and showing
 oneself as one of them, so “we like people who are like us.” (Gifu &
 Teodorescu, 2014: 24);
 o Compliments: everyone likes to receive compliments and they produce
 sympathy;
 o Familiarity and Association: the persuader keeps direct eye contact with
 the addressee or customer, which makes the latter feel closer to the former;
 o Imitation shade: to rehearse the way in which the persuasive speech will
 be exposed in front of a mirror: the gestures and the position of the body,
 the hands, the head adopted increase the possibility of influencing and
 persuading addressees. They, conforming to Vincze, “…may have a
 persuasive impact […] while one is silently listening to the opponent’s
 speech and cannot interfere verbally” (2009: 188).

- Authority: when the persuader shows themselves as a confident and authentic
 person, the public tend to follow what they say. The greater the relationship the
 public and the authority person, the greater the persuasive power.

- Scarcity: Less available opportunities or products draw more people’s attention:
 “if a product is rare or hard to get, people tend to buy more of that product”
 (Cialdini, 2001). Many of these products are sold with a higher value than the one
 they actually have, but only because they are limited and special; most consumers
 feel such an emotional charge that they cannot resist consuming them.

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2.2.2. Emotional techniques (pathos)

These techniques are used to generate emotions in the addressees through a specific
situation that the addresser faces to achieve the success of the persuasive discourse.
Emotions have the power to modify our judgments (Gifu & Teodorescu, 2014: 19); thus,
persuaders usually resort to expressing feelings such as fear, culpability, sorrow, or
intimidation so that the public empathizes with them:

 - Dissonance: through this technique, the persuader tries to create unpleasant
 feelings in the addressee, offering them an effective solution at the same time, and
 reducing the dissonance caused at first. For example, a cosmetic brand, which
 offers an immediate and effective solution to facial wrinkles, tends to create first
 the unpleasant feeling of aging or being aged in the adult audience, but this feeling
 disappears if the addressee buys the product offered. Thus, it would mean that the
 wrinkles will disappear and they will no longer look old.

 - Sincerity: this technique consists in recognizing a certain negative fact of oneself
 to a public, seeing the latter a positive side in such a fact and accepting the
 persuader’s truthful speech. Imagine that an individual tells their friends that they
 do not like being always a shy person. This negative fact of oneself will be seen as a
 positive fact by the friends, who would may try to convince them to accept themselves as
 they are and that being shy is not as bad in every situation.

 - Plea: the persuader usually portrays a weak and harmless image of themselves to
 awaken in the public the necessity of protecting and taking care of them. Plea is
 commonly used in social media, for instance, when an influencer tells the
 audience that they have suffered from cancer, awaking in the public a need to
 support, encourage and take care of them.

 - Accomplishment: persuaders offer addressees the opportunity of achieving
 something in exchange for profiting. In advertising, persuaders tend to frequently
 use this technique. For instance, when a clothes brand offers discounts, the target
 audience will benefit from these discounts by buying some clothing items from
 the brand, and, at the same time, they will tend to recommend such a brand to
 friends. Hence, the friends and the brand will benefit: the former by having a
 discount and the latter by being promoted.

2.2.3. Logical-argumentative techniques (logos)

These techniques refer to the structure and grammatical elements used by the persuader
in their language. Through them, they try the persuasive text to make a good impression
on the public (Fuentes-Olivera et al., 2001).

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- Interpersonal metadiscourse: this function corresponds to the grammatical
 components in the persuasive discourse. Thanks to the interpersonal
 metadiscourse, addressees would be able to recognize the real attitude the
 persuader has towards their discourse and to the addressees themselves. Person
 markers, hedges and emphatics are the three types of markers we will focus on
 this study:

 o Person markers: The personal pronouns persuaders use in their discourses
 influences much on its success. As Fuentes-Olivera et al. state, in the case
 of persuasion in advertisements, addressers “should give the impression
 that they are addressing a consumer personally” (2001: 1298). Hence,
 persuaders tend to make use of the person markers “you”, to communicate
 the message directly, or “I” and “we” to foster an inclusive sensation
 instead of an exclusive one. Furthermore, the use of these person markers
 creates a sense of familiarity and closeness to the public. For instance, by
 using the use of the first-person singular pronoun, “I”, the persuader will
 express their own experiences to awaken confidence in the addressees and
 to persuade them in the end, thanks, above all, to the familiarity shown by
 the persuader.
 o Hedges: According to the Cambridge dictionary, a hedge is “a word or
 phrase that makes you say less strong. […] They make what we say less
 direct” (2021). They are items such as “think”, “may”, “perhaps”, “just”,
 and “could”, and, thanks to them, the persuader is able to conceal or
 dissimulate their point of view about an issue to be socially accepted. The
 persuader uses them to mitigate the force of their propositions in the
 discourse and to reinforce the accuracy of what is said in it, increasing thus
 the addressers’ credibility through the trust the persuader generates in
 them. They are also used “to emphasize what the product really is or does
 associating what they say about the product to shared knowledge”
 (Fuentes-Olivera et al., 2001: 1300). In other words, hedges are also
 employed in persuasive speech to clearly state what a particular product
 has by using facts recognizable to almost everyone in a community or a
 culture.
 o Emphatics: these items give a higher force and certainty to the discourse.
 Persuaders use emphatics, such as “incredible”, “of course” and
 “amazing”, in their discourse to intensify adjectives, phrases or adverbs,
 making addressees think that the features of what is being offered are
 totally true and necessary in their lives. Thus, they help addressees to
 overcome the moral dilemma they face when they are going to acquire
 products that, maybe, they do not really need.

- Textual metadiscourse: it is “the function that language has of creating text, of
 relating itself to the context – to the situation and the preceding text” (Halliday,
 1978: 48). Then, textual metadiscourse refers to all those elements that give

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coherence to a text, in such a way that all its sections are related to each other, and
 to other texts. Furthermore, the persuader tries to keep it simple and brief to catch
 the addressee’s attention sooner. Hyland (1998) distinguishes between logical
 connectives, frame markers, endophoric markers, evidentials, and glosses4. In this
 study, we are going to focus on studying the metadiscourse strategy of endophoric
 markers since persuaders tend to frequently use them in their speech to let
 addressees recognize their intention:

 o Endophoric markers: as Fuentes-Olivera et al. say (2001:1302) “are
 expressions which refer to other parts of the text and help in making
 additional ideational material salient, thus aiding addressees in the
 recovery of the addresser’s argumentative intention”, such as according
 to. Additionally, endophoric markers also link pictures with words, so as
 Myers (1994) states, the audience can construct messages through images.
 These messages that are illustrated in pictures have the function of
 persuading, although the metatextual information appears in an abstract
 mode. For instance, if the picture is of a celebrity, the message given will
 be more relevant to the addressee.

4
 Due to time and space limitations, I will not discuss all these strategies in this study.

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3. Manipulation

3.1. What is manipulation?

As well as persuasion, the concept of manipulation has been defined in many ways by
many different scholars. According to Philips (1997: 15-16), the term manipulation is
defined as “a deliberate and successful attempt by one person to get another person by
appeals to reason to freely accept beliefs, attitudes, values, intentions, or actions”, or, in
other words, “a devious way to control the others”. (Fairclough, 1989:6). Hence,
manipulation is a communicative and interactional practice, in which the manipulator is
the person who handles other people and usually puts them against their will and their
best interests, as Van Dijk (2006: 360) states. Besides, Karamova et al. (2019: 414) agree
that, when a person manipulates another, they5 are influencing on the subconscious of the
addressee to correct the current picture of the world, “the formation of motives beneficial
to the addressee behavior”.
 All these definitions have in common that, in the manipulation process, the
manipulated person ends up being controlled and forced, albeit unconsciously for them,
to change their own interests from the beginning. In addition, as Baron (2003: 44) argues,
what manipulators intend to do with their target audience is to exploit their “emotional
needs”, that is, their weaknesses. Those people who are easier to manipulate are the same
that tend to be influenced by others, those who are “susceptible to suggestion, allowing
themselves to be manipulated, without noticing the very fact of introducing motives of
behavior that are beneficial to the manipulator”, as Karamova et al. (2019: 417) suggest.
 In a manipulative discourse, the truth principle is violated many times. That is,
persuaders occasionally prefer or must resort to persuasion for manipulation to be carried
out successfully to decrease the manipulative force of their tone; it is, then, that the
persuader turns into a manipulator, and the persuasive discourse becomes a manipulative
one. One of the main differences between manipulation and persuasion is that the former
involves the manipulator’s abuse of power and authority over the manipulated person
while in the latter, persuaded “are free to believe or act as they please” (Van Dijk, 2006:
361), no matter whether they accept as true or not the arguments of the manipulator. On
the other hand, as Cabrejas Peñuelas (2015: 518) declares,

 “manipulation should be differentiated from any of the forms of legitimate persuasion (e.g.,
 education, information), in which persuaders attempt to convince their interlocutors by using
 (legitimate) means – for example, by giving proving and thoughtful arguments.”

 Therefore, it could be said that, when dominating the addressees, the
manipulator’s main task and goal is that of making a person – or group of people – believe
or perform an action of interest to the manipulator, positioning them even against their

 5
 I will use the pronouns “they”, “them” and “themselves”, and the determiner “their” to refer to the
 manipulator throughout this study with a singular meaning.

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own interests. Therefore, manipulation implies the exercise of a form of illegitimate
influence by means of discourse (Van Dijk, 2006: 360).
 Besides persuasive discourse, the manipulative discourse will be dealt with in this
study as a form of interaction, analyzing the influence that the discourse itself has over
the public thanks to the manipulation techniques used by the manipulator. That is what
will be discussed below in the following section.

3.2. Manipulation techniques

According to Pesina et al. (2020: 333), there exist three groups of linguistic manipulation
tools: lexical-syntactic, lexical-semantic and lexical-pragmatic tools. For manipulative
speech to take place, it is essential that manipulators know how to use them properly. As
Bogart (1972: 13) explains through a metaphor, “…persuasion techniques are like
sharpened knives. They are tools and, of course, the person who deals with these tools
should have honest principles”. In other words, if a persuader uses these tools improperly,
violating their honest principles, then they will become a manipulator.
 Regarding the lexical-syntactic tools, they include tools for linguistic manipulation,
that is, changes in phraseological units; the lexical-semantic tools refer to the relationship
between a word and its subject-conceptual content expressed; and the lexical-pragmatic
tools correspond to linguistic manipulation at the lexical level based on pragmatics
aspects (Pesina et al. 2020: 333). We will focus this study on the analysis of the lexical-
pragmatic tools that we commonly find in the manipulative discourses, that is, in the
words which have a particular connotation, indirect nominations, such as euphemisms
and labels (Sternin, 2001: 147). As Saussure (2005: 3) explains, in a manipulative
discourse, the ordinary method of the pragmatist is not to talk only about understanding
but about the complex way that leads from comprehension to believing. Therefore, the
following techniques and strategies, corresponding to the lexical-pragmatic tools, have
been chosen according to Pesina at al. (2020: 333-334) and Saussure (2005: 17):

 - Fake news: Giving false information about a fact, or offering a distorted reality,
 is what is done in almost every manipulative discourse. A high number of
 manipulators make use of pseudo-statistics to purposely mislead the information
 given in their discourse to the audience, who trusting the given data believes
 something that is not actually true. Moreover, most manipulators tend to replace
 “the cause by the effect” of an idea in which they directly expose the effects of
 such an idea, hiding the cause of it, by using introductory words and constructions
 such as “it is obvious” or “it means…”. (Pesina et al. 2020: 334). For example,
 saying that someone has lung cancer – the effect – without saying that he/she has
 smoked cigarettes for 30 years – the cause.

 - Elimination of some lexical items from public discourse: when exposing fake
 news, the manipulator tends to eliminate the obsoletes words irrelevant to the
 audience and replace them with new abbreviations, allusions, etc. An example of
 this is saying “LOL” instead of “laughing out loud”, so English speakers will

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recognize the meaning of this abbreviation easily. Besides eliminating uncommon
 words nowadays, they eliminate dysphemisms and replace them by euphemisms
 to generate a better impression, such as replacing terrorist by freedom fighter:
 “euphemisms have great manipulative potential […] to change the audience’s
 perception of events if it does not have a sufficiently developed critical thinking”
 (Pesina et al., 2020: 333). Briefly, they improve the meaning of the text, increasing
 at the same time the credibility of the audience in the discourse.

- Unmotivated analogies: As Saussure (2005: 18) states, manipulators use them to
 build a context where assumptions are present in the cognitive environment of the
 hearer, even if they are unconscious beliefs. They tend to present them as a simile
 or a metaphor, linking elements that share some similarities.

- Labeling: in this case, this technique consists on attributing a false and a negative
 meaning to a notion and, hence, achieving manipulators their goal of making the
 audience rethink their initial thought towards it and reject it. This shows the abuse
 of power of the manipulator over the audience, previously discussed in Section
 3.1., dominating and deviating the addressees from their interests.

- “One’s own gang” technique: For the manipulator’s goal to be fulfilled, it is also
 of great importance that they maintain a close relationship with their target
 audience. To do so, they would need to maintain a “friend-or-foe”6 relationship
 (Koveshnikova, 2014: 394). As Pesina at al. say, through this technique, the
 manipulator can manipulate the audience of being a capable person to “get onto
 the hopes of ordinary people” (2020: 333). In addition, manipulators use jargon to
 conceal the real meaning from other individuals so that only a specific social group
 can understand it. In other words, they are words used by manipulators “to show
 a special attitude towards the group and its values” identifying themselves as “one
 of them” Pesina at al. (2020: 333). For example, when the manipulator talks about
 medicines’ components to someone who has not too much idea of medicines, they
 can manipulate them easily.

- Mapping: Through this technique, the manipulator can attract the audience to
 their promoted idea, by talking about its prestige and benefits. Nevertheless, most
 times the prestige and benefits are not true, so the manipulator claims it only for
 their own benefit.

- Authority: The person who conveys the speech is the authority in the
 communicative act. When the manipulator shows himself or herself as a confident

6
 Friend-or-foe: in marketing, the goal of relationship is to build customer loyalty for the firm (Crosby
& Johnson, 2001: 10). This term has been created from “the principle of the binary opposition “plus-
minus” when “own” is opposed to “alien”” (Koveshnikova, 2014: 394). The manipulator must be an
ally of the addressee to avoid be seen as an enemy for achieving his goal.

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and authentic person, they have the power to put pressure on the public to obey
 what they say. Then, the greater the relationship between the public and the
 authority person, the greater the manipulative power. For instance, in social
 media, some people realize giveaways, in which individuals must follow the bases
 they tell them to win such a giveaway.

- Fear: On many occasions, manipulators try to convince addressees that
 something will happen if they do not do what they ask them to or if they do not
 consume ‘x’ product, in case they are trying to sell one.

- Accomplishment: Manipulators offer addressees the opportunity of achieving
 something in exchange for obeying them. If the manipulator is disobeyed,
 addressees would be unable to get the reward. Nevertheless, in this case, the
 manipulator offers a fake sense of accomplishment to the audience, since they will
 be the only person who will take benefit.

- Sitting carriage: Zachary (2014) states: “this technique is the achievement of the
 desired response via indoctrination that the idea is generally accepted and
 reasonable”. In other words, after imposing their power over the audience by
 convincing them about what they say being accepted by a reasonable society, they
 achieve their main objective: to manipulate. The audience ends up being
 manipulated as they turn to “herding instincts”7, accepting the promoted idea
 (Pesina et al., 2020: 334).

7
 According to Cambridge Dictionary, to herd an instinct is a situation in which people act like
everyone else without considering the reason why.

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4. Relevance Theory

In Sections 2.1. and 3.1. we have seen that, despite the existing differences between the
definitions of manipulation and persuasion, they share the same goal: to get the public’s
attention to make them behave or act in a certain way. Even then, to achieve such a goal,
addressers can communicate their message either overtly or covertly. Nevertheless, to get
a better understanding of both types of communication, it would be convenient to define
first the basic notions of Relevance Theory, which is the conceptual framework we will
adopt in this work and to which overt and covert communication are related.
 Relevance theory is defined as “a cognition-centered pragmatic approach to human
communication which is based on the hypothesis of a single evolved mental capacity of
human beings: to search for the most relevant information from in-coming stimuli” (Yus
2006: 512). Hence, in relevance theory, there are two main principles: the cognitive
principle, from which the relevance of an input derives, and the communicative principle,
from which the presumption of optimal relevance derives. In the former, human beings
try to look for the most relevant input, so for information to be relevant to the hearer, it
needs to be first processed in the hearer’s mind. It should be connected in some way with
the hearer’s representation of the world: with his/her cognitive environment (Sperber &
Wilson (1995: 48). Then, if the hearer receives new information related with the one
he/she already knows, it produces greater positive cognitive effects on him/her, and then,
it is more relevant. The communicative principle is based on two main facts: 1) the
ostensive stimulus provided by the addresser is relevant enough to be worth the
addressee’s effort to process it, and 2) the ostensive stimulus provided by the addresser
is the most relevant compatible with the addresser’s preferences and abilities. This is the
presumption of optimal relevance (Sperber & Wilson, 1995: 267-270).
 In the context of relevance theory, once human beings have processed the
propositions uttered by the addresser, a series of assumptions are represented in their
minds, whose degree of manifestness is raised by the received stimulus. The degree of
manifestness is always going to depend on the cognitive environment of the hearer: that
is, on his/her innate psychological principle of relevance (Crook, 2004: 716). Sperber &
Wilson (1995: 39) define the concepts of manifestness and cognitive environment in the
following way:

 - Manifestness: a fact is manifest to an individual at a given time if and only if he
 is capable at that time of representing it mentally and accepting its representation
 as true or probably true.
 - Cognitive environment: is a set of facts that are manifest to an individual.
 The same assumptions or facts may be manifest in the cognitive environments of the
addresser and addressee, becoming the intersection of their two cognitive environments
a set of facts manifest to them both, i.e. a shared cognitive environment or a mutual
cognitive environment. In relevance theory, the notion of mutual knowledge is substituted
by mutual manifestness, according to Sperber & Wilson (1995: 39), since it is not

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necessary for addresser and addressee to mutually know the assumptions required to
interpret the propositions uttered.

4.1. Informative and communicative intention

In Section 2, it was seen that one of the essentials aims in persuasion is to inform the
audience of a certain fact to call its attention. As Wänke & Reutner (2009: 6) assert: “in
many persuasion contexts receivers are well aware of the persuader’s intentions”, and
depending on the intention of the persuader, it may be provoked “reactance”8 (Brehm,
1966) on the addressee. For instance, in a manipulative discourse, the manipulated person
may not understand what is said due to the manipulator’s techniques, posing the
manipulated some problems to understand the manipulator’s informative intention.
Attributing intentions is crucial in persuasive and manipulative discourses. Sperber and
Wilson (1995) differentiate two types of intentions in Relevance Theory: the informative
intention, and the communicative intention. On the one hand, they define the informative
intention as “an intention to induce in an audience certain attitudes to certain
propositions” (1995: 51); that is to say, it is an intention to make an audience believe that
certain propositions are true. Sperber & Wilson also state that what a person does by
having an informative intention is to make manifest a set of assumptions to the audience
(Ibidem: 58). On the other hand, when a person has a communicative intention, he/she is
making mutually manifest – to himself/herself and the audience – that he/she has an
informative intention (Ibidem: 61).
 Saussure (2005: 24) explains the informative intention as “a set of assumptions
corresponding to what the speaker means by the utterance”, and “this set of assumptions
represent the informative intention of the speaker”. The addresser, intends then, “to make
manifest or more manifest a set of assumptions to an individual” (Sperber & Wilson,
1995: 58) to let addressees recognize his or her informative intention. In other words,
what the addresser wants is to inform the addressee of something specific and to make
him or her believe certain facts. Nevertheless, the informative intention is only recognized
by the addressee when he/she understands it, clearly adopting the information given by
the addresser as part of his/her beliefs or cognitive environment. If it succeeds, the
addressee will understand the meaning of the addresser. Thus, it would mean that he/she
has done a previous effort to understand it because the discourse is at least relevant
enough to be worth processing (Taillard, 2002: 199).
 The informative intention is that which appears in every discourse given. As
commented in Section 3, in both overt communication and covert communication, the
addresser presents an informative intention: at least, he/she has to inform addressees of
something, and when this happens, the addresser could be using overt or covert
communication. Nevertheless, when the addresser also has the intention to communicate
something, he/she would be using only overt communication.

 8
 The term reactance was developed by Jack Brehm in 1966. According to him, “reactance is conceived
 to be a counterforce motivating the person to reassert or restore the threatened or eliminated freedom”,
 and it is only given “in the context of other forces motivating the person to give up the freedom and
 comply with the threat or elimination” (1981: 37).

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To fulfill the informative intention, in most cases, addressers have a
communicative intention. The communicative intention of the addresser is to have his/her
informative intention recognized by the audience (Sperber & Wilson 1995: 29; Taillard,
2002: 199), or, as Sperber & Wilson state: “to make it mutually manifest to audience and
communicator that the communicator has this informative intention” (1995: 61). If the
addresser has the intention to communicate something, he/she needs to be aware that the
addressee needs to recognize his or her informative intention: “my intention to
communicate is best fulfilled if I make it manifest to my audience in such a way that there
is no question in their mind that it was indeed my intention” (Taillard, 2002: 190). One
way to interpret information is to determine the addresser’s communicative purpose,
according to McCann & Higgins (1992). On the contrary, if the addressee does not
recognize the informative intention of the addresser, the communicative intention does
not go through.
 Therefore, communication is seen as “involving an informative intention which is
embedded within a second-order communicative intention” (Crook, 2004: 718). For
instance, as seen in Section 3.1., the goal of a manipulator is to make a group of addressees
believe something of interest to the manipulator. Then, imagine that someone needs
money to pay their debts and wants their sister to lend them some money without asking
for it. Therefore, they put on top of the table the receipts to be paid along with their bank
account. In this situation, they make manifest their informative intention – letting their
sister know that they have to pay some debts –, but not their communicative intention –
that they want their sister to pay the debts –.
 In the next two sections, we explain the concepts of overt or ostensive
communication and covert communication, which we consider key to the analysis of
social media.

4.2. Overt communication

According to the presumption of optimal relevance, explained in Section 4 and to the
informative and the communicative intentions explained in Section 4.1., overt
communication is used when both the informative and the communicative intentions are
disclosed, as Sperber & Wilson argue in Relevance (1995). Forceville (2014: 8) declares
that, if the addresser tries to attract the audience’s attention, convey information as well
as attitudes to create an effect on the audience without a necessary effort, he/she is using
then ostensive – or overt – communication. Basically, the intention to inform the hearer
of something (i.e. the communicative intention) implicates that “communication is overt
by its very nature” (Crook 2004: 719).
 As Becherif & Tanaka state, “ostensive communication is an overt form of
communication on which there is, on the part of the speaker, an intention to alter the
mutual cognitive environment of the speaker and the hearer” (1987: 127). Addressees
then, according to Sperber & Wilson (1995: 270-271), will put effort to process the
ostensive stimulus given, since it is relevant enough and their main aim in interpreting an
utterance is to identify the speaker’s informative intention. Thus, the presumption of
optimal relevance is communicated by any type of ostensive communication.

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4.3. Covert communication

According to Becherif & Tanaka, “covert communication is a case of communication
where the intention of the speaker is to alter the cognitive environment of the hearer, i.e.
to make a set of assumptions more manifest to her, without making this intention mutually
manifest” (1987: 127). While in overt/ostensive communication both the informative and
the communicative intentions are mutually manifest, in covert communication the
addresser does not want their communicative intention to be recognized – to be mutually
manifest –, but just their informative intention. As Crook (2004: 733) states, overt and
covert communication are distinguished from one another in respect of mutual
manifestness. What the addresser tries to do then by using covert communication is to
inform the addressee of something, that is, to make some information manifest to the
addressee, hiding at the same time his or her actual communicative intention (i.e. without
making his informative intention mutually manifest):

 He does intend to affect the cognitive environment of his addressee by making her recover certain
 assumptions, but he avoids the modification of the mutual cognitive environment of the addressee
 and himself by not making this intention mutually manifest. In other words, he does not publicise
 his informative intention. (Tanaka, 1994: 41).

 There are some advantages to using this type of communication in the discourse,
as Durán Martínez (2005) states. One of them is that, basing on the low cooperation that
exists between the addresser and the addressee, if the former shows their informative
intention overtly, it could have an adverse effect on the achievement of their goal. For
instance, if an advertiser makes mutually manifest their intention in selling a product is
to make profit besides describing the product in the best possible light, the audience will
not be as involved in such a product as they do not make mutually manifest their intention
to make profit (communicative intention) and simply describes the product in the best
positive way (informative intention). Nevertheless, there are more disadvantages than
advantages when using covert communication, since manipulation can take place. For
instance, a skin-care company manipulate their target audience into believing that their
products will make them feel more attractive by eliminating their wrinkles and providing
a rejuvenating appearance. In this case, the addresser will become a manipulator who
plays with the emotion of the eternal youth and the insecurities of most adult population.
Therefore, addressers use covert communication for two main reasons: to hide their
communicative intention and to attract the audience’s attention to the product itself and
its features.

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5. Analysis of female influencers discourse

5.1. Corpus: influencers, publications, and videos selected

For the corpus that I will analyze in this study, I have been saving several posts9 and
videos published by influencers10 on social networks since the end of February until the
beginning of April. Due to space limitations and according to the several persuasion and
manipulation strategies used, I have finally chosen a total of two posts and two videos
which have been published by North American female influencers on the social networks
of Instagram and YouTube, since my aim is to analyze the way in which female
influencers use persuasion and manipulation in their content11. To do so, I have chosen
two consolidated influencers – i.e. influencers who have more than a hundred thousand
followers on social media – and two unconsolidated influencers – that is, influencers who
have more than a thousand and less than a hundred thousand followers. I have chosen
both kinds of influencers to analyze and compare the discourses they use.
 On the one hand, I have selected two Instagram posts published by a consolidated
influencer, whose username is @sincerelyjules and who has 5.7 million followers12 on
this social network, and another post by an unconsolidated influencer, whose username
is @tiakirby and who has 14,200 followers. On the other hand, I have chosen parts of two
videos from YouTube which published by a consolidated influencer, whose channel
name13 is Nikkie Tutorials and who has 13.8 million subscribers14, and another video by
an unconsolidated influencer, whose channel name is Black moon Lilith and who has
2,280 subscribers. I have chosen these posts and videos to examine how persuasion,
manipulation and their strategies are employed by the influencers and to analyze whether
they use overt or covert communication – and communicate their informative intention,
their communicative intention, or both.

5.2. Analysis of the influencers on Instagram

Instagram is a social networking platform/site where people publish visual content, such
as pictures and videos, and are also able to interact with their followers or other people
by comments, likes or sharing content. Nowadays, marketing companies use Instagram
to promote themselves thanks to certain influencers that they select before. In Sections
5.2.1 and 5.2.2., I focus my analysis on studying which type of discourse is used by each

 9
 In social media, the term “publication” tends to be substituted by “post”.
 10
 According to Cambridge Dictionary (2021), an influencer could be “someone who affects or
 changes the way that other people behave” or “a person who is paid by a company to show and describe
 its products and services on social media, encouraging other people to buy them”.
 11
 The concept “content” refers to the set of publications and videos that each influencer uploads to her
 social media.
 12
 On Instagram, individuals who see, like, comment, and share what the influencer’s posts are called
 “followers”.
 13
 The account of each member of YouTube is called “channel” in this platform.
 14
 On YouTube, individuals who see, like, comment, and share what the influencer posts are called
 “subscribers”.

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– consolidated and unconsolidated – influencer when they promote companies’ products
on Instagram.

5.2.1. Discourse analysis of the consolidated influencer on Instagram

As seen in Fig. 1, Julie Sariñana (sincerelyjules) is promoting in her February 2021 post
the brand ‘Moroccanoil’. In doing so, she has posted a picture of her sitting, apparently
content, next to a beauty product and has written a caption15 promoting the product by
stating how satisfied she is with the products of that brand.

 Figure 1. Julie Sariñana’s promotion of a ‘Moroccanoil’ product

 The company that runs the brand ‘Moroccanoil’ has hired this influencer to
promote its products due to the huge number of followers she has on Instagram, since this
would mean that more people would notice its brand, and, subsequently, it would mean
an increase in the number of product sales. Besides, this influencer would also benefit
economically, since the brand pays her per promoted product a certain amount of money.
Consolidated influencers are not as much interested in obtaining a higher number of
followers – as they have already many – as in keeping the ones they already have for the
economic benefit they get from them – whether consciously or unconsciously16.

 15
 Right below or next to the published picture, the influencer usually writes a caption, where they
 reflect their discourse; most of the times, the written discourse is related to the picture.
 16
 Individuals who just follow influencers to see, like, comment and share their posts, are already
 unconsciously giving them economic benefits, since Instagram pays influencers a certain amount of
 money depending on the followers they have. Individuals who buy the products which influencers
 promote in their posts are consciously giving them economic benefits.

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