Hacker News Reader

It's also using passive voice.

Consider: "We will terminate your verified status for adding links to one of our competitor's sites."

When someone is lying, the passive voice is a very common choice of words.

(Source: I took a forensic linguistics course as part of a comp. linguistics program. One of the case studies we looked at was lying-- the data sets were comparing legal cases where documents were available that contradicted testimony, like the Enron case.)

Edit: Here's a research paper that talks about it: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4981627/

Where can I read more on this?

A masters program in forensics..

I don't remember the source of the material when I took the class, but it's been built upon since then. Here's one example that used the Enron corpus:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4981627/

> When someone is lying, the passive voice is a very common choice of words.

The passive voice was used to write this sentence.

In your comment, yes; In my comment, no. You can use the passive voice detector to examine it: https://datayze.com/passive-voice-detector.php

Fun fact: That detector uses zombies!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com