ABSTRACT
Especially after Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Brexit referendum, public awareness of the power of viral conspiracy theories and their relationship to misinformation and fake news has risen significantly. It is thus appropriate to recall a definition of semiotics by Umberto Eco:
semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used ‘to tell’ at all.
(Eco 1976: 7)