Comparison of retrograde vs. antegrade intramedullary nailing for extra-articular distal tibial fracture: a retrospective matched case-control study.

In digital communication environments, readers often encounter questionable claims before external verification is available. Misinformation, understood here as false or misleading information that may circulate regardless of intent, has therefore become a major concern in domains such as politics, health, and social issues (). Its impact depends not only on how widely false claims spread, but also on how readers evaluate their credibility and decide whether they should be shared. Beyond individual misunderstanding, misinformation may also produce broader social harms, including the distortion of public opinion, the amplification of social anxiety, and the erosion of trust in institutions (). Accordingly, a growing body of research has examined the spread of misinformation (e.g., ), the psychological processes underlying credibility evaluation and truth discernment (e.g., , ; ), and strategies for correcting or mitigating its influence (e.g., ; ). Most empirical and theoretical research on misinformation has focused on the psychological and social factors that shape its acceptance and spread, whereas far fewer have examined the linguistic and discursive features through which misinformation is constructed and communicated (e.g., ; ; ; ; ). Yet such features are central to how misinformation is formulated and made interpretable to audiences. For example, ) showed that content characteristics such as length, place, time, emotion, and calls for action were associated with the veracity of COVID-19 rumors, suggesting that message-level features may play a meaningful role in how readers evaluate questionable claims. One important class of message-level cues involves ambiguity in evidential framing. In linguistic and pragmatic research, such expressions are often discussed as forms of hedging, because they reduce explicit commitment to propositional content and introduce uncertainty, tentativeness, or vagueness (; ). Common examples include reduced source identifiability, such as anonymous or weakly identifiable source attributions (e.g., ), modal expressions (e.g., ), and vague quantifiers (e.g., ). In misinformation contexts, such expressions may increase the apparent plausibility of claims while simultaneously reducing their verifiability (). However, the psychological function of such cues is not straightforward. Ambiguity -related hedging cues may make a claim appear more cautious and therefore more plausible, but they may also alert readers to weak evidential support and reduce perceived reliability.