This article considers the issues of mass media manipulation. Due to the enormous influence of mass media discourse on public consciousness and behavior, mass media are often used as a tool for informational and psychological impact on society and pose an information threat to it. In this regard, the relevance of studying the phenomenon of manipulativeness, as well as recognizing manipulative texts by machine processing on a large corpus of texts, is beyond doubt. At the same time, given the hidden nature of manipulation, it is rather difficult to determine such mechanisms and means of manipulation that can become valid metrics for diagnosing the level of manipulativeness of news. This article defines the concept of manipulativeness, and also considers some lexical markers from the entire complex of manipulative means that have a high manipulative potential. The research material consisted of 500 manipulative publications, selected by linguistic experts after careful reading and observation of the linguistic material.