2. Recognizing Emotional Manipulation
Fear and disgust-based framing is one of the most common tools in misinformation, particularly when talking about MAiD.
Emotional language is powerful because it bypasses careful reasoning and goes straight to instinct. Words like “killing,” “poison,” or “abandonment” aren’t used to describe MAiD—they are used to evoke fear, anger, and moral urgency, often before the person has had the chance to consider what MAiD actually involves in practice.
This can be especially influential because MAiD already carries deep emotional weight: suffering, death, vulnerability, and family dynamics. When those emotions are amplified or selectively framed, they can reshape how people interpret the entire issue, making rare or hypothetical scenarios feel common, or turning legally structured medical care into something that feels chaotic or dangerous. That’s what makes emotional manipulation so effective—it doesn’t need to argue against the actual safeguards or criteria. It simply changes how those safeguards feel, and once something feels wrong, people often stop asking whether it actually is.
It’s rare for someone to admit that they are using emotionally charged language to make their point, but sometimes they do. The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition did just that in a post on their blog titled The effective use of language in the assisted suicide debate. That is unusual: most time the person slips in the emotional language with the hope that you don’t notice—understanding that it is human nature to react strongly to words like “murder”, “poison”, or “death lobby”.
Learning to recognize when these words or phrases are being used, and your emotional reaction to them, allows you reject those terms and identify the strategy being used to manipulate you.
If You Control the Language, You Control the Fear: How the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition Talks About MAiD - MAiD in Canada
Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science.
Brady, W. J. et al. (2017). Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks.