(22) I heard everyone say this was just like a flu... the flu kills 6 thousand people a year ... I don’t need to be told... I can see and act for myself... but there are donkeys who believe everything that’s said to them... and as they said it wasn’t coming here and that anyway, it’s no more than a flu, well (pues) caution to the wind... [...] (Facebook, 19-05-2020).

4.1.4. Claro (of course)

Another frequent marker in the corpus is claro, an epistemic modal conversational marker which, especially on Facebook and YouTube, expresses evidence and can be interpreted as a reinforcement of an assertion, see (24) where the author of the message adopts capital letters to intensify the enunciation and impose his/her opinion on the other participants:

(23) They’re accelerating everything very quickly and of course (claro) now no-one’s dying, they’re lying through their teeth and we’ll all end up paying with fresh outbreaks, bravo and bravo again for their handling of this [...] (Facebook, 01-06-2020).

(24) SEÑOR SIMÓN SAID WHAT???..NO WORRIES HAHAHA, WE’RE AT 2097 CASES AND COUNTING..YOU DARE TO COMPARE US TO CHINA AND KOREA?..ARE YOU FUMIGATING THE STREETS AND CITIES LIKE IN CHINA & KOREA?...[...] ..NOOO ALL YOU CARE ABOUT IS EASTER IN SEVILLE, MARCH 8TH, FOOTBALL, ETC INSTEAD OF POSTPONING IT, OF COURSE (CLARO) AS FUNCTIONARIES YOU GET PAID 100% OF YOUR SALARY AND US WORKERS GET 70...[...] (YouTube, 01-03-2020).

In other cases it allows the speaker to evaluate the evidence of the member of the discourse that it introduces in relation to the data found in the discourse, in context, or that is presupposed in the mind of the speaker or in those of the participants in that interaction (Martín Zorraquino & Portolés Lázaro, 1999: 4150). In (24), for example, claro introduces a statement that alludes to public sector workers receiving 100% of their salaries, addressing them in the second person plural to support his/her argument, that is, that the civil servants in the Ministry of Health are not worried about the pandemic.

Claro can trigger procedures of cooperation between interlocutors, indicating possible areas of agreement between them. Note how, in this exchange, B utilises claro to confirm what A has said and, at the same time, to reinforce the argument that A had introduced, concerning the sincerity and credibility of the government:

(25) A: As if we were kids, you could have been sincere from the beginning about it being obligatory but that there weren’t enough, and fine. One has to be consequent, this way you lose all credibility

B: Of course (Claro) they didn’t tell us the truth because they knew there weren’t any on the market, they lied to us. They play with us like puppets. [...] (Facebook, 19-05-2020).

However, when placed at the beginning of this type of comment, it is more common as a transmitter of disagreement, when admitting a concession to successively introduce a restriction (Landone, 2012: 1812). In other cases, as we see in (27), it even expresses a critical attitude with ironic intention, by which the speaker invites the listener to infer the opposite to what is explicitly stated:

(26) Of course (Claro), they don’t even bother to update them. They’ve just changed the time. They’re laughing at us (Twitter, 28-04-2020).