The article is focused on the linguistic aspect of the analysis of English fake news for manipulative strategies of influence on the audience. The study material is English fake news texts selected from social media and news websites, particularly on the COVID-19 pandemic, political elections, and the threat of climate change. The relevance of the work is determined by the significant role of fake news in shaping public opinion, the need for increasing media literacy, especially within the English-speaking society, as English is the language of global communication, and by creating effective mechanisms of revealing and combating them. Objective: The study aims to define the lexical, stylistic, and discursive features of fake news and to reveal the main strategies of manipulation. Methods: A comprehensive methodology, including content analysis, discourse analysis, psycholinguistic and comparative methods, serves as a basis for the study. Results: It has been found that fake news texts are characterised by using emotionally coloured vocabulary, categorical statements, and different rhetorical devices such as exaggeration, fear-mongering, and distortion of facts. The lexical and semantic analysis reveals that the manipulative strategies in the examined material aim to provoke an emotional reaction in the addressee, particularly fear and indignation. Conclusions: Thus, the comparison with authentic news texts shows that fake news focuses on dramatic elements, while actual texts focus on factual and neutral information.