Reader Comments Agentive Power in COVID-19 Digital News Articles: Challenging Parascientific Information?

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an enormous stream of information. Parascientific digital communication has pursued different avenues, from mainstream media news to social networking, at times combined. Likewise, citizens have developed new discourse practices, with readers as active participants who claim authority. Based on a corpus of 500 reader comments from The Guardian, we analyse how readers build their authorial voice on COVID-19 news as well as their agentive power and its implications. Methodologically, we draw upon stance markers, depersonalisation strategies, and heteroglossic markers, from the perspective of discursive interpersonality. Our findings unearth that stan…