Social Media and Society: Integrating the digital with the social in digital discourse 9027213631, 9789027213631

Table of contents :
Social Media and Society
Editorial page
Title page
Copyright page
Table of contents
Connecting the digital with the social in digital discourse
Outline of the volume
References
Digital distribution processes and “new” research tools in SM-CDS
CDS and distribution processes
Social media and distribution processes
New synergies and new research tools for SM-CDS
Social network analysis and CDS
Sentiment analysis and CDS
Digital ethnography and CDS
Concluding remarks
References
Digital practice as discriminatory discourse
Introduction
Contextualising regional discrimination against Henan people
Participatory culture and digital communication
Media discourse and regional discrimination
Affective CDA
Affect-technology dynamics on Chinese news portals
Approach and the case
Analysis and discussion
Contextualised by media discourses
Encouraged in peer-to-peer interactions
Locative IP-address function as a discursive reinforcer
Conclusion
References
Social media soft affective politics through discursive and algorithmic synchronization
1. Introduction
2. Sociohistorical profile
3. Multimodality, hybridity, and discursive synchronization
4. Zain
5. The 2017 Zain commercial
First sequence
Second sequence
Third sequence
Fourth sequence
Fifth sequence
Sixth sequence
6. Audience reaction, visibility, and synchronization
7. Synchronization, social media, and soft affective politics
8. Conclusions
Acknowledgements
References
Towards an ethnographic approach to social media discourses
Introduction
Ethnic nationalism and Greek national identity (re)constructions
Synthesising multi-sited digital ethnography and critical discourse studies
The discourse-historical approach and argumentation
Ethnography of users and selection
Communicating Greek patriotism on Facebook
Facebook as a terrain of digital activism and political debate
Concluding remarks
References
Unpacking disinformation as social media discourse
Introduction
Disinformation on social media
Discourse studies and social media
Fake Muslim Facebook pages and discourse theory
Fake Twitter discourse and critical discourse analysis
Fake letters to the editor on ‘Folkets Røst’
Conclusion
References
Language typology as a discursive affordance in digital discourse
Introduction
Digital media and critical discourse studies
From critical discourse studies to language typology
The sociopolitics of Silesian identity and the “camouflaged German option”
Pro-Silesian and anti-Silesian discourses in online political discussions
Case study
Conclusions
Acknowledgements
References
Online counterspeech and the targeting of digital discourses of racism in New Zealand
Introduction
Researching online counterspeech
Social Media-Critical Discourse Studies
The case study
Analysis and discussion
Conclusion
References
Sexism in digital discourses of women
Introduction
Social media and discursive practices
Social media
CDS, gender, and digital feminist movements
Analysis and discussion
Using man-made language
Recirculating unequal social roles
Victim-blaming
Physical appearance
Dress
Drink
Adaptation to the sexist order
Spiral of silence or “name and shame!”
Conclusion
Post-script developments
References
A journal of impossible things
Introduction
The Whoniverse
Digital fandom, cult TV & gender
The case
Trolling the broflakes
Social justice warriors, Feminazis & the (Anti)-PC police
A penis-operated TARDIS
Discussion & conclusion
Epilogue
References
Index

Citation preview

discourse approaches to politics, society and culture

Social Media and Society Integrating the digital with the social in digital discourse edited by Majid KhosraviNik

100

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY

Social Media and Society

Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture (DAPSAC) issn 1569-9463

The editors invite contributions that investigate political, social and cultural processes from a linguistic/discourse-analytic point of view. The aim is to publish monographs and edited volumes which combine language-based approaches with disciplines concerned essentially with human interaction – disciplines such as political science, international relations, social psychology, social anthropology, sociology, economics, and gender studies. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see benjamins.com/catalog/dapsac

General Editors

Jo Angouri, Andreas Musolff and Johann Wolfgang Unger

University of Warwick / University of East Anglia / Lancaster University [email protected]; [email protected] and [email protected]

Founding Editors

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Advisory Board Christine Anthonissen Stellenbosch University

Michael Billig

Loughborough University

Piotr Cap

University of Łódź

Paul Chilton

University of Warwick

Teun A. van Dijk Universitat Pompeu Fabra,

Barcelona

Konrad Ehlich

Free University, Berlin

J.R. Martin

Louis de Saussure

Jacob L. Mey

Hailong Tian

University of Sydney University of Southern Denmark

Greg Myers

Lancaster University

John Richardson

University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia

Luisa Martín Rojo

Universidad Autonoma de Madrid

Christina Schäffner

University of Neuchâtel Tianjin Foreign Studies University

Joanna Thornborrow Cardiff University

Ruth Wodak

Lancaster University/University of Vienna

Sue Wright

University of Portsmouth

Aston University

Volume 100 Social Media and Society. Integrating the digital with the social in digital discourse Edited by Majid KhosraviNik

Social Media and Society Integrating the digital with the social in digital discourse Edited by

Majid KhosraviNik Newcastle University

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

doi 10.1075/dapsac.100 Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress: lccn 2022061158 (print) / 2022061159 (e-book) isbn 978 90 272 1363 1 isbn 978 90 272 5325 5

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© 2023 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com

Table of contents Connecting the digital with the social in digital discourse: An introduction to the scene Majid KhosraviNik Digital distribution processes and “new” research tools in SM-CDS Eleonora Esposito and Majid KhosraviNik

1 15

Digital practice as discriminatory discourse: Technological meaningmaking, affect, and representation of Henan people on Chinese news portals 38 Altman Yuzhu Peng Social media soft affective politics through discursive and algorithmic synchronization: Evidence from a Kuwaiti YouTube video Francesco L. Sinatora

60

Towards an ethnographic approach to social media discourses: Exploring ethnic nationalism and the Greek ‘right’ to the name ‘Macedonia’ Salomi Boukala and Dimitris Serafis

83

Unpacking disinformation as social media discourse Johan Farkas and Yiping Xia

107

Language typology as a discursive affordance in digital discourse: The case of the “camouflaged German option” online Krzysztof E. Borowski

127

Online counterspeech and the targeting of digital discourses of racism in New Zealand Philippa Smith

146

Sexism in digital discourses of women: Connecting the digital and social dimensions when comparing the #Sendeanlat and #Metoo campaigns Cemile Tokgöz Şahoğlu

167

A journal of impossible things: Tweeted discourses of gendered digital fandom on the thirteenth doctor and #NotMyDoctor hashtag Meredith L. Pruden

187

Index

209

Connecting the digital with the social in digital discourse An introduction to the scene Majid KhosraviNik

University of Newcastle

The political concerns struggles about power where discourse is the flagship bearer of (modern) power. This is contingent on the assumption that society is constituted by discourse (and vice versa) and that power relations in society are discursive (Fairclough and Wodak 1997). Although power structures are constructed, maintained, or challenged through modes of communication, e.g., language, these systems are not powerful in and by themselves (Weiss & Wodak 2003: 14). Language is powerful in its context of use, i.e., who is saying what to whom, in what manner and why, hence analysing communication without the context of use is a descriptive endeavour at best. Contextual explications are essentially about working assumptions in processes of production, consumption, and distribution of meaningful content. For example, in the case of the mass communication paradigm, there is the key assumption of the power behind (mass media) discourse, i.e., that these systems operate based on a linear, one way, oneto-many textual dynamic. In other words, power is safely assumed in terms of the capacity of one group of (media) elites to address a large body of audiences in the society. Mass media, by definition, have a preferential access to the re/production and re/creation of (hegemonic) narratives. This is what makes them powerful, and hence political. A plethora of research in Media and Communications analyses mass media discursive apparatuses, e.g., the press as important top-down elite institutions with ample power over various symbolic resources (e.g., KhosraviNik 2015, among many others). In the meantime, discourse is theorised as both constituting and constituted by society. That is, there is a dialogic reciprocation between top-down and bottom-up discursive practices. While the top-down dynamic has traditionally appealed to many social scientific scholarships, it is important to note that there is also cumulative power in discourse via conversations among members of society, despite its sporadic nature. In essence, the notions of both the power behind discourse in the case of mass communication and the power in discourse in https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.100.01kho © 2023 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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the case of interpersonal communication are relevant considerations in social politics of communication. The core message here is that working assumptions about communicative systems should always be critically scrutinised and adapted in discourse studies. The advent, penetration, and latent massive development of digital participatory environments mark a paradigmatic shift in the dynamic of communication across the two established communicative models of mass and interpersonal communication, with implications for the established notion of power in critical discourse studies. The stipulated paradigm of Social Media Communication (SMC), with its specific parameters (KhosraviNik 2017, 2022), integrates both top-down (media) and bottom-up (interpersonal) affordances in the discursive dynamic. As such, the traditional theorisation of the power behind discourse does not automatically apply any more (KhosraviNik 2014). The new SMC communicative paradigm transforms the traditional unambiguous distinctions between producers and consumers of discursive materials and the linear control over representational resources. In a similar vein, it replaces the traditional unidirectional oneto-many interface of mass media with a (potential for) many-to-many, fluid, unpredictable dynamic of discursive practice. The main analytical requirement in research on this new communicative dynamic is to delineate an all-encompassing definition for what is meant by Social Media Communication from a communicative perspective. As such, the paradigm of Social Media Communication would refer to: …any electronic platform, space, site, and technology by which users: (a) work together in producing and compiling content; (b) can perform interpersonal communication and mass communication simultaneously or separately – sometimes mass performance of interpersonal communication; and (c) have access to see and respond to intuitionally produced texts (e.g., newspaper articles) and user-generated content/texts. (KhosraviNik 2017: 582)

This definition encompasses obvious Social Networking Sites (SNSs) such as Facebook and LinkedIn; websites with a crowd sourcing content model, e.g., Wikipedia, electronic forums etc.; link sharing/news management sites, e.g., Digg; micro/blogging sites, e.g., Tumblr and Twitter; and Instant Messaging Apps with the possibility of setting up group communication such as WhatsApp, Weibo, etc. It is also important to note that with the rapid advancement of the digital into the societal, new platforms and spaces for such a discursive dynamic are constantly emerging. Unlike the layman’s use of the term, social media here refers to a specific communicative dynamic, rather than a specific set of spaces or platforms; and, as such, SMC is concerned with conditions of use rather than the technology. For example, users in specific digital geographies may exploit

Connecting the digital with the social in digital discourse

the available affordances for such participatory discursive practice in ways not intended by the platform designers. The realities to hand in researching the context of such Social Media Communication indicate that, on the one hand, there should be critical scrutiny of common theoretical presuppositions and, on the other hand, interdisciplinary steps should be taken to facilitate a viable and relevant understanding of this “new” context of discursive practice. This would include both macro-theoretical and industrial conceptualisations regarding digital media use, as well as new synergies around approaches to analysing discourse in these new spaces of power. In the meantime, this is also about doing focused case-study research within the CDS remit to see how the wider (social) and local (digital) contexts merge, and what kind of impact this may have in terms of the content and shape of the digital discourse to hand. The key consideration in critical discourse studies (in its broad sense across social scientific research) is the extrapolation of context and how that comes into play in the analysis. Balancing levels of inclusion of critical contextual discussion with details of textual analysis has been a traditional tug-of-war in linguistically oriented vs a wider range of disciplines using CDS, e.g., media studies. While this debate may continue, in the case of digital CDS we are faced with new twists in the way context can be envisaged. The defining characteristics (and indeed novelty) of CDS is its critical effort to critically integrate the social and discursive levels. This is where the textual analyses are contextualised within their relevant critical social theory. While this remains a key factor in the overall approach, the new communicative dynamic of digitally mediated communication calls for a twotier understanding of the context of production and interpretation of meaningmaking, i.e., digital (horizontal) and social (vertical) contextualisation. A socially oriented Social Media Critical Discourse Study (SM-CDS) is deemed to navigate through the triangle of social, digital, and discursive points. In other words, connecting the discourse (as in analysed data) and the social (as in social context and social theory) cannot be done effectively unless the digital context of use (as in social media theory, participation, etc.) is also considered. Among the three key aspects, the digital is simply a new, under-researched, and underrated aspect of CDS. As for discourse, there are already ample (exciting and relevant) developments regarding the analysis of data, e.g., various linguistic models, multimodality, etc. As for the social aspect, CDS is already very strong in drawing on various schools of thought and critical theory coming from the social sciences, political theory, cultural studies, etc. The calls for the integration of the digital aspect into any analysis of social media data/ discourse are in fact directly linked to the explanatory agenda and social scientific relevance of CDS. CDS is about critical explanations of what goes on in discourse formation and perception and how that

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impacts on society. Such a mission cannot be accomplished without considering the crucial understanding of the digital context. It is important to note that SM-CDS is not a clear-cut formula of operations, nor is it meant to be. Various studies may draw on different types and levels of digital considerations, with some leaning heavily on discourse analysis and others on the technology aspect. This is more about awareness and attempts to make some level of interdisciplinary out-research into the technological aspect of the digital discourse under analysis. In fact, so-called Social Media CDS is a set of top level considerations for doing critical digital discourse studies (see KhosraviNik 2022 for a list of considerations). In trying to delineate these insights into a clearly marked critical analysis of discourse, it builds on a host of excellent previous and current scholarship by several colleagues working in an around the field providing ample room for fruitful debate. I have written about some of these debates and projected integrations in several previous publications as my exploration of the field continues. The insights from Androutsopoulos’ work (2008, 2013) have been instrumental in the way I would envisage a qualitative digital ethnographic aspect for Social Media CDS. That is, in order to account for the digital context of production and consumption, one cannot help but engage in some kind of digital observational endeavour. Broadly speaking, observational approaches (Hine 2015) are to be pushed to the fore for digital CDS, going beyond the obvious function of locating relevant data and sampling justifications. It is now more difficult and less justified (than before) to separate texts from their immediate contexts of use. Hine (2015) acknowledges the value of a form of discourse analysis for online ethnography and argues that the two approaches are mutually relevant despite the fact that, as she postulates, discourse analysis has not habitually been an ethnographic endeavour, i.e., it overtly focuses on the text itself (2015: 106). Incorporating digital ethnography is also about accounting for what I call “digital practice” as part of the immediate context of use, which determines what actions are connected to meaning-making in addition to the discursive content. Digital practice is a key notion in determining the norms, technological affordances, and qualities of their use in the horizontal digital context. Traditionally, CDS works with a Faircloughian notion of discursive practice which includes scrutiny of processes of production and consumption of discourses in terms of their genre, and distribution (Fairclough 1992: 71). The notion of “practice” in communicative events has been rather different in studies in Literary Studies, e.g., Barton and Lee (2013) especially in the influential Discourse in Action approach of the late Ron Scollon (e.g., 2001; Scollon and Scollon 2004). This is about focusing on and accounting for the details of communicative action exactly as it unfolds and accounting for its qualities, circumstances, and con-

Connecting the digital with the social in digital discourse

tent. This focus has been one of the distinctions with (a perception of ) the CDS approach characterised as being predominantly focused on the text and a wider political critique. This is partly because CDS has (arguably) been more interested in top-down powerful texts (media, politics, policy texts) rather than nuances of localised interactive contexts. Nevertheless, the theory of CDS does entail paying particular attention to circumstances of production and consumption of meaning-making. In the meantime, I agree that the interventionist political critique of CDS has been much stronger, and I continue to emphasise this aspect as a key distinction for SM-CDS. In reconsidering these notions in the context of digital media, I have benefited from the work of Rodney Jones and colleagues (Jones 2004; Norris and Jones 2005; Jones et al. 2015; Barton and Lee 2013; Tagg 2015; among others) and their approach. Specifically, I argue that their understanding of the notion of “practice” in doing digital discourse analysis is very relevant to Social Media CDS. Practice, Jones et al. (2015: 2) argue, is seen “more as a matter of the concrete, situated actions people perform with particular meditational means”. Here, the “basic unit of analysis is the mediated action, which is effectively the practice where the text is used” (Barton and Lee 2013: 14). In addition to the insights around digital practice which help the methodological signposting for SM-CDS, there is ample work on digital discourse analysis within sociolinguistics and discourse analytical trends. The work of Susan Herring continues to influence a generation of researchers. Herring (2010) calls for a reorientation of the methods used in the analysis of content towards a multifaceted approach which incorporates a combination of discourse analysis, social network analysis, and content analysis in response to the technological specificities of digital platforms as elaborated in her earlier influential work (Herring 2004). In her proposal for content study of the Web, Herring (2010) combines a form of social network analysis (link analysis) from sociology, content analysis from communication studies (analysis of themes), and (computerised) discourse analysis from linguistics. This is mainly proposed in acknowledgement that the meaningmaking operation on the Web can not be limited to descriptions of semantic meanings of language. In line with the proposals for a new understanding of the concept of multimodality on the Web within the SM-CDS remit (KhosraviNik 2017), Herring’s proposal for Web content analysis comprises image analysis, theme analysis, and feature analysis, as well as exchange and language analysis. Speaking from a clearly marked linguistic perspective (conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, pragmatics, text analysis), Susan Herring (2014: 2) positions discourse analysis – not necessarily critical discourse analysis – as part of a broadly defined interdisciplinary study of computer mediated communication. In discussing her Computer Mediated Discourse Analysis model (CMDA)

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(2004), she maintains that her model differs from other forms of discourse analysis in that its descriptive and interpretive apparatus crucially takes into account the technological affordances of CMC systems, and its methodological toolkit is customised to address common phenomena in CMC (Herring 2014 interview). In contrast to the top-down approaches currently popular in analysing big data mined from the Internet, she characterises CMDA as a bottom-up approach. Another important consideration concerns the way technological design, business models, and normalised practices on social media may promote affective vs argumentative rationality, among other consequences (KhosraviNik 2018). This is about accounting for how available affordances and discursive practices online may interact in the meaning-making process. Studies already show that social media spaces are highly affective environments (Papacharissi 2015) and that, together with the political economy of the platforms, this feature impacts on the promotion of a populist style of communication. This is exacerbated by the fact that the technological design of commercial social media spaces algorithmically prioritises content that is deemed more likely to be consumable by a given user and helps to create stronger bonds and relatability (KhosraviNik 2019). Michelle Zappavigna’s work around the notion of “ambient affiliation” (2011) provides insights into the way searchable language on Twitter (as a classic SMC space) is viewed as a hallmark of a cultural shift towards aspirations for forming communities of shared value (ibid.: 789). Her detailed model of analysis often extends beyond considerations of content and involves how available affordances, e.g., hashtags, play a role in meaning-making. Ambient affiliation, Zappavigna and Dreyfus (2022: 46) argue, is about “how social connection is forged in social media discourse, even in the absence of direct interaction between users. It can be seen in the ways that people commune around shared experience and values on any given topic, often through particular digital affordances such as hashtags”. As the notion of ambient affiliation is applied in different case studies (Zappavigna 2022), it carries the key point that meaning-making is about the practice as much as it is about the (various semiotic) content, i.e., discourse meanings spread across communicative contents and practices (KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018; KhosraviNik 2022). Zappavigna’s work points to crucial directions in the ways that technology is (implicitly) implicated in the characterisation of sociopolitical discourses, e.g., the way that a technological understanding may help to understand the rise of misinformation online (Inwood and Zappavigna 2021). Several other colleagues have continued to work on digital discourses with insightful case studies and approaches. Gwen Bouvier (2022) explores discourses of twitter around #metoo and racism, while Bouvier and Machin (2021) elaborate on the digital multimodal aspect of cancel culture. Ruth Page’s (2012) approach to digital storytelling introduces another important perspective on the way digital

Connecting the digital with the social in digital discourse

discourses are shaped, produced, and consumed, in terms of both genre and archetypal framing (narrative analysis). Page et al. (2014) explore various issues of doing digital discourse studies with an eye to providing a simpler view of research operations. Several scholars of BAAL Language in the New Media group continue to add to the body of scholarship in and around the field of digital discourse, with varying degrees of conceptualisation and critical intent. There are also other studies which do not normally come under the radar of a typical discourse analyst with some exceptional potentials and overlaps. These are particularly relevant to recent suggestions for the critical consideration of TechnoDiscursive design in CDS where technological design is taken as part of meaningmaking with explicit discursive consequences (see KhosraviNik 2018 for details). In particular, while the impetus for Techno-Discursive Analysis is on the backdrop of traditions in CDS to encourage the meaningful integration of digital theory and technological impact into typical CDS analysis, there are studies from the media and technology side which seek to integrate (some form of ) discourse studies into their analysis of technology. Andre Brock (2018) for example, discusses a Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) approach in analysing Black Twitter discourses. This approach argues that isolated disciplinary applications of discourse or technological analysis does not suffice; hence, the approach is to combine “analyses of information technology material and virtual design with an enquiry into the production of meaning through information technology practice and the articulations of information technology users in situ” (ibid.: 1113). It pulls together crucial aspects of critique, technology, and discourse to “unpack semiotic and material connections between form, function, belief, and meaning of information and communication technologies (ICTs)” (ibid.: 1112). The stipulated aims here are clearly socially oriented, integrate technology and discourse, and are explicitly critical in line with CDS classic parameters. Brock’s work not only echoes the new calls for the interdisciplinary integration of social critique in analysing digital discourse but also argues against unhelpful disciplinary divides and techno-deterministic postulations regarding social issues such as race. Another key study is that by Benoit Dillet (2022), which focuses on a specific Techno-Discursive characteristic of social media, i.e., the algorithmic regimentation of discourses (KhosraviNik 2018). It aims to engage with the way algorithms are at play in political communication and persuasion on social media. He argues that “the increasing agency that algorithms have acquired in delivering and mediating rhetoric means that we must consider the role played by intermediaries when examining rhetorical situations” (ibid.: 231). Dillet’s work is positioned in a closely related field of political rhetorical analysis with many overlaps and traditions of cross0referencing (Atkins et al. 2014). In the meantime, it makes a similar point around the problem of ignoring digital technology’s role in the quality of

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discursive production and perception. He crucially argues that the link between the social and the discursive (aka rhetoric), is not a direct one, i.e., there is technological design (algorithms) at play as part of “the assemblage of rhetorical situations (composed of speakers, arguments, context, effects)” (ibid.: 232). These studies show a trend in converging towards an integrative understanding of the mechanism of meaning-making on the participatory Web and the fact that several disciplinary assumptions need to be critically scrutinised for a meaningful analysis of digital discourse. Regardless of which side of technology vs discourse one may come from, the central argument is that these two sides are intertwined, i.e., that technological design, digital practice, and affordances are part of meaning-making and hence fall within the remit of CDS analysis (KhosraviNik 2022). This book is a collected volume of contributions from a range of scholars with an interest in digital discourse. The editing process has mainly focused on ushering the studies to consider the impact of participatory Web, in addition to discourse analyses, i.e., connecting the digital with the social. The aspiration has been to critically engage with developments in the ways in which representations around discourses of identity, politics, and culture are implicated through social media. Where possible, the book aims to introduce insights into theory, methods, and the application of a symbiotic relationship between social theory and Critical Discourse Studies in contemporary digital discourses. Throughout the book, the emphasis is on striking a balance between the incorporation of new mediation interface and traditions of discourse studies in a creative and contributory manner. The book is part of the developing research framework around Social Media Critical Discourse Studies which aspires to delineate curious and fresh interdisciplinary integration of digital and discursive dimensions by re/interpreting the principle of CDS into the new digital dynamic. This includes considerations of how new technologies may have had an impact on norms and processes of discursive practice and meaning-making and how these new processes re/shape and challenge notional traditions in CDS. The book brings together scholars coming from various backgrounds with a focus on contemplating the interface of discourse and digital media practice. This includes views from sociolinguistics, political discourse studies, media and technology, discourse theory, popular culture, feminism, etc. The global geographies of case studies extend from the UK and Europe to the USA, New Zealand, Turkey, and China. The book focuses particularly on emerging works in digital media and critical discourse studies which are open to new synergies, i.e., coming to/ going from the CDS field and striking a meaningful balance between the social and the digital. These contributions have been carefully solicited to gauge a glocalised approach in making the key argument that digital affordances and societies interact and form differ-

Connecting the digital with the social in digital discourse

ent creative relationship beyond the media determinist understanding of social media – without falling into a cultural essentialist trap. The contributions have been selected based on the relevance, quality, and diversity of case studies from an international cohort of scholars. While the authors’ individual approaches, understandings, and choices have been respected in the editing process, the overall string-threading of the volume concerns the arguments for new considerations in the analysis of digitally mediated discursive practice as stipulated in Social Media CDS (KhosraviNik 2017, 2022; KhosraviNik and Unger 2016; KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018; among others).

Outline of the volume The book comprises chapters specifically on theory and methods of doing CDS on Social Media as well as a range of case studies from a number of social scientific fields. The studies stem from or draw on fields of media and technology, sociolinguistics, political communication, feminism, and film studies. As well as case studies on the “Arab world”, China, Turkey, Sweden, Poland, the US, Greece, and New Zealand; some chapters also provide some form of interdisciplinary proposal, argument, or framework as a response to the new digital interface in doing CDS research. Chapter 2 Digital distribution processes and ‘new’ research tools in SM-CDS, by Esposito and KhosraviNik, focuses on the key notion of distribution processes in CDS and the ways in which the new digital dynamic can be mapped onto this notion. Within an envisaged organisation for Social Media CDS, authors focus on the specific nature and context of digitally mediated meaning-making in contemporary social media and set out to explain the suitability of a set of new tools in analyses of digital discourse. The chapter introduces a number of analytical tools and techniques for the visualisation and analysis of social media data and shows how these tools can work as complementary techniques for SM-CDS studies. In particular, the chapter elaborates on three methods, namely, Social Network Analysis, Sentiment Analysis, and Digital Ethnography, as useful methods/ approaches to explore the new dynamic of discursive distribution, affectivity, and social power relations in digital discourse. Chapter 3 Digital practice as discriminatory discourse: Technological meaningmaking, affect, and representation of Henan people on Chinese news portals, by Altman Peng, brings a fresh outlook on the way technology and discursive representation work together. He discusses how the technological architecture of interactive digital platforms may have opened up new channels for Internet users’ practice of discriminatory discourses. The chapter speaks to new challenges in

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the field of Critical Discourse Studies, in which the technology-discourse axis of discursive practice was once overlooked. To address this gap, the chapter incorporates and draws on the concept of affect to examine the ways in which users’ discursive practices are reshaped by the design of interactive digital platforms. Then, an affective critical discourse analysis approach is mapped on to Internet users’ practices of regional discriminatory discourses against Henan people as a case study. The chapter reveals the extent to which regional discrimination is amplified by the locative IP-address function of the NetEase news portal’s user commentary systems. Chapter 4 Social media soft “affective politics” through discursive and algorithmic synchronisation: Evidence from a Kuwaiti YouTube video, by Francesco Sinatora, explores the link between language and social media “affective politics” through the case study of a YouTube commercial by the Kuwaiti Zain telecommunication company. This very popular video exhorts Muslims to reject Islamic terrorism and embrace a moderate version of Islam through a hybrid, emotional mixture of language, music, and images of victims of terrorism. Sinatora argues that the commercial constitutes an example of soft affective politics curated algorithmically, linguistically, and multimodally, and capitalises on the indexicality of multimodal communication. The study shows how the algorithms for the commentary section yield more visibility to comments giving a discursive interpretive nudge, and hence manipulating the discursive power of representation. The chapter illustrates how the algorithmic synchronisation underlying soft affective discourse works in a contingent way with discursive practices within a technodiscursive dynamic by situating a “micro” analysis of linguistic dynamics within the “macro” power-discursive environment. Chapter 5 Towards an ethnographic approach to social media discourses: Exploring ethnic nationalism and the Greek “right” to the name “Macedonia”, by Salomi Boukala and Dimitris Serafis, sets out to show how the arena of political debate has been relocated from Parliament to Facebook in contemporary Greece and explores the parameters and impact of such a relocation in discourses of contemporary political polemics. It explores the way social media spaces combine bottom-up and top-down discourses and their repercussions for discourses of national identity. It considers the postulation that platforms such as Facebook have enabled communication between civilians and politicians in shaping a new public sphere within this new discursive dynamic. In line with studies on the Self and Other in digital discourses of identity, the chapter particularly focuses on the dispute over the name “Macedonia” in Greek digital discourses and proposes an ethnographic approach to the analysis of social media discourse by integrating traditions in discourse studies, anthropology, and digital ethnography.

Connecting the digital with the social in digital discourse

Chapter 6 Unpacking disinformation as social media discourse, by Johan Farkas and Yiping Xia, explores the mutual contributions of discourse studies in disinformation research as a perspective that has so far remained underrepresented. Drawing on three case studies, the chapter argues for the usefulness of discourse studies in mapping critical aspects of digital disinformation campaigns that are often neglected in existing scholarship. The three cases revolve around the Russian Internet Research Agency, fake Muslim Facebook pages, and far-right conspiracy theories disguised as tabloid news. The chapter highlights the importance of critically examining the constitutive role of antagonism and the “performance of authenticity” on social media, as well as connections to wider discourses, sociopolitical struggles, and power relations. The chapter concludes by arguing that critical forms of discourse studies can help to address key questions of why disinformation gains traction on social media through credibility building and the amplification of existing narratives and stereotypes. It argues that discourse studies can be integrated into social scientific research on social media disinformation, i.e., by critically exploring the signification of concepts, such as “fake news”, which have been increasingly subject to political contestation. Chapter 7 Language typology as a discursive affordance in digital discourse: the case of the “camouflaged German option” online, by Krzysztof E. Borowski, attends to the impact of participatory social media as new arenas of political discourse. Building on emerging research around the intersection of participatory social media and critical discourse studies, the chapter discusses critical digital discourse analyses that account for cross-linguistic typological variation and argues for their relevance to political discourse. The chapter examines linguistic creativity in non-elite online political discourses by combining a critical discursive approach with a focus on language typology. Focusing on Polish-language online data, the chapter shows how offline discourse can leak into online contexts and how the new digital context impacts on discourse development in derivative messages of an ideological nature. The chapter demonstrates how digitally manipulated language affordances are mobilised for political reasons to (re)produce political messages that are instrumentalised for scapegoating and discriminatory arguments in bottom-up political discourses in social media spaces. Chapter 8 Online counterspeech and the targeting of digital discourses of racism in New Zealand, by Philippa Smith, seeks to position online counterspeech in the relatively new framework of Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SMCDS). The chapter argues that online counterspeech itself is emergent, in that it is an Internet phenomenon whereby anyone with Internet access can post online content with the objective of challenging or disputing another person’s speech or ideology, whether this concerns race, religion, or political beliefs. It postulates that critical examination of the discourses inherent in the many-to-many dynamic of

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bottom-up online social interactions calls for innovative ways of investigation, in addition to traditions in CDS where existing frameworks may fall short in theoretically recognising and accounting for the techno-discursive dynamic of digital discourse and how the new environments may produce a new dynamic of power and influence in discourse formation and consumption. This chapter focuses in particular on online counterspeech through one form of it – the anti-racist discourse in the comments section beneath a YouTube video in New Zealand. Chapter 9 Sexism in digital discourses of women: connecting the digital and social dimensions in comparing #Sendeanlat and #Metoo campaigns, by Cemile Tokgöz Şahoğlu, aims to point out the implicit sexist codes in digital discourses unwittingly produced by women while supporting cyberactivist feminist movements. Drawing on research on feminism and insights from Social Media Critical Discourse Studies, the chapter concentrates on the discursive practices of both Turkish and global cyberactivist movements. It tries to show the roots of micropower produced by users in the context of cultural differences by comparing these two campaigns. The chapter particularly focuses on the two hashtags #MeToo and #SenDeAnlat. This chapter combines the traditions in applying CDS to analysis, i.e., the categorisation of discursive topics, trends, and strategies, with consideration of the impact of a digital interface. This includes using overt sexist language, e.g., degrading words for the female body; the reproduction of traditional unequal social roles, e.g., men as protectors and punishers; victim-perpetrator reversal, e.g., blaming victims for their physical appearance, dress code, and drinking; and developing suppressive regimes for public space as a solution. Chapter 10 A journal of impossible things: Tweeted discourses of Gendered digital fandom on the thirteenth Doctor and #NotMyDoctor hashtag, by Meredith L. Pruden, looks at discursive struggles and trends during the announcement to cast the first ever female actor as the new Doctor Who. This new regeneration (i.e., recasting) of an iconic, and consummately upper crust, British character follows twelve previous white male Doctors into the bigger-on-the-inside blue police box to traverse space and time and save the “Whoniverse”. The chapter maps discursive trends in arguments around the constructed impossibilities and projection of a rupture with Whovian mythology in light of racialised, gendered and heteronormative social norms that simply would not allow The Doctor to be anything other than a straight, white British man. This chapter takes a critical feminist perspective and employs social media critical discourse studies to examine the #NotMyDoctor hashtag that trended on Twitter the day of the announcement and investigates audience responses to the Thirteenth Doctor.

Connecting the digital with the social in digital discourse

References Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2008. “Potentials and limitations of discourse-centred online ethnography”. Language@Internet vol., 5 (9). Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2013. “Online data collection.” In Data collection in sociolinguistics: Methods and applications, ed. by C. Malinson, B. Childs, & V. Herk, 236–250. Routledge. Atkins, Judi, Finlayson, Alan, Martin, James and Turnbull, Nick. (eds.). 2014. Rhetoric in British Politics and Society. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137325532 Barton, David, and Lee, Carmen. 2013. Language online: Investigating digital texts and practices. Abingdon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203552308 Bouvier, Gwen. 2022. “From ‘echo chambers’ to ‘chaos chambers’: discursive coherence and contradiction in the #MeToo Twitter feed.” Critical Discourse Studies 19 (2): 179–195. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2020.1822898

Bouvier, Gwen, and Machin, David. 2021. “What gets lost in Twitter ‘cancel culture’ hashtags? Calling out racists reveals some limitations of social justice campaigns.” Discourse & Society 32 (3): 307–327. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926520977215 Brock, André. 2018. “Critical technocultural discourse analysis.” New Media & Society 20 (3): 1012–1030. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816677532 Dillet, Benoît. 2022. “Speaking to algorithms? Rhetorical political analysis as technological analysis.” Politics 42 (2): 231–246. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395720968060 Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity Fairclough, Norman, and Wodak, Ruth. 1997. “Critical Discourse Analysis.” in Discourse as Social Interaction, ed. By T. van Dijk, 258–284. London: SAGE. Herring, Susan. C. 2004. “Computer-mediated discourse analysis: An approach to researching online behavior.” In Designing for virtual communities in the service of learning, ed. by S. Barab, R. Kling, & J. Gray, 338–376. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511805080.016

Herring, Susan. C. 2010. “Web Content Analysis: Expanding the Paradigm”. In International Handbook of Internet Research, ed. by J. Hunsinger, L. Klastrup, and M. Allen, 233–250. Springer: London and New York. Herring, Susan. C. 2014. “Research: Computer-mediated communication”. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 40 (3): 41–44. https://doi.org/10.1002/bult.2014.1720400313

Hine, Christine. 2015. Ethnography for the Internet Embedded, Embodied and Everyday. Bloomsbury Academic. Inwood, Olivia, and Zappavigna, Michele. 2021. “Ambient affiliation, misinformation and moral panic: Negotiating social bonds in a YouTube internet hoax.” Discourse & Communication 15 (3). https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481321989838 Jones, Rodney. 2004. “The problem of context in computer-mediated communication.” In Discourse and technology: multimodal discourse analysis, ed. by Levine, T., and Scollon, R., 22–33. Georgetown University Press: Washington. Jones, Rodney H., Chik, Alice, and Hafner, Christoph. A. (eds.) 2015. Discourse and digital practices: Doing discourse analysis in the Digital Age. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315726465

KhosraviNik, Majid. 2014. “Critical discourse analysis, power, and new media discourse.” In Why discourse matters: Negotiating identity in the mediatized world, ed. by M. Kopytowska & Y. Kalyango, 287–305. Peter Lang.

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KhosraviNik, Majid. 2015. Discourse, Identity and Legitimacy; Self and Other in representations of Iran’s nuclear programme. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. KhosraviNik, Majid. 2017. “Social media critical discourse studies (SM-CDS).” In Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies, ed. by J. Flowerdew & J. E. Richardson, 582–596. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315739342-40 KhosraviNik, Majid. 2018. “Social media techno-discursive design, affective communication and contemporary politics.” Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 11 (4): 427–442. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-018-0226-y KhosraviNik, Majid. 2019. “Populist digital media? Social media systems and the global populist right discourse.” Public Seminar. https://publicseminar.org/2019/10/populistdigital-media-socialmedia-systems-and-the-global-populist-right-discourse/ KhosraviNik, Majid. 2022. “Digital meaning-making across content and practice in social media critical discourse studies.” Critical Discourse Studies 19 (2): 119–123. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2020.1835683

KhosraviNik, Majid, and Esposito, Eleonora. 2018. “Online hate, digital discourse and critique: Exploring digitally mediated discursive practices of gender-based hostility.” Lodz Papers in Pragmatics: Special Issue on Narrating Hostility, Challenging Hostile Narratives 14 (1): 45–68. https://doi.org/10.1515/lpp-2018-0003 KhosraviNik, Majid, and Unger, Johan. W. 2016. “Critical discourse studies and social media: Power, resistance and critique in changing media ecologies.” In Methods of critical discourse studies. 3rd ed., ed. by R. Wodak, & M. Meyer, 205–233. SAGE. https://uk .sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/methods-ofcritical-discourse-studies/book242185 Norris, Sigrid, and Jones, Rodney. H. 2005. Discourse in action: introducing mediated discourse analysis. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203018767 Page, Ruth. 2012. Stories and Social Media: Identities and Interaction. New York: Routledge. Page, Ruth, Barton, David, Unger, Johan. W., and Zappavigna, Michelle. 2014. Researching language in social media. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315771786 Papacharissi, Zizi. 2015. Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. Oxford University Press. Scollon, Ron. 2001. Mediated Discourse: The nexus of practice. London, Routledge. Scollon, Ron, and Scollon, Suzie Wong. 2004. Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging Internet. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203694343 Tagg, Caroline. 2015. Exploring Digital Communication Language in Action. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315727165 Weiss, Gilbert, and Wodak, Ruth. 2003. “Introduction: Theory, Interdisciplinarity and Critical Discourse Analysis.” In Critical Discourse Analysis: Theory and Interdisciplinarity, ed. by G. Weiss, & R. Wodak, 1–34. Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan. Zappavigna, Michele. 2011. “Ambient affiliation: A linguistic perspective on Twitter.” New Media & Society 13 (5): 788–806. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810385097 Zappavigna, Michele. 2022. “Social media quotation practices and ambient affiliation: Weaponising ironic quotation for humorous ridicule in political discourse.” Journal of Pragmatics 191: 98–112. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.12.003 Zappavigna, Michele, and Dreyfus, Shoshana. 2022. “‘In these pandemic times’: The role of temporal meanings in ambient affiliation about COVID-19 on Twitter.” Discourse, Context & Media 47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2022.100595

Digital distribution processes and “new” research tools in SM-CDS Eleonora Esposito & Majid KhosraviNik University of Navarra | Newcastle University

The present chapter aspires to clarify the critical role of different distribution processes in conceptual organisation for Social Media CDS (SM-CDS), an emerging theory and method wherein the specific nature and context of digitally mediated meaning-making is structurally integrated into CDS research (KhosraviNik 2020; KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018). In order to map key distribution processes and critical caveats around them in the digital sphere, we discuss some specific theoretical views around the notion of the distribution process in CDS, introduce analytical tools and techniques for the visualisation and analysis of social media data, and show how they can work as complementary techniques for SM-CDS studies. While rooted in core critical discursive principles, in fact, SM-CDS aspires to selectively and systematically incorporate digital theory approaches such as data science and analytics, visualization methods and videography, among others. In particular, we present three different methods, namely Social Network Analysis, Sentiment Analysis, and Digital Ethnography, as useful approaches to explore complex aspects of discursive distribution, affectivity, social and power relations in the cybersphere.

CDS and distribution processes A key postulation in Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) is its aspiration to account for three main different levels of processes in which the meaning-making materials under investigation are involved, namely processes of production, processes of consumption, and processes of distribution (Fairclough 1995). In their endeavour to map and critically explain communicated meanings, CDS scholars aim to consider who is communicating with whom and via what mechanisms and affordances. Processes of production and consumption encapsulate the second and third levels of research strategy in the Faircloughian three-dimensional research framework, where they explain both the immediate and wider context of interpretation in language (or other meaning-making materials) in use (Fairclough and https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.100.02esp © 2023 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Wodak 1997; Fairclough 2003). There is a plethora of approaches and theories framing how this interpretative context should be explicated and integrated into the foundational interdisciplinary principles of CDS. This is also where the key approaches in CDS differ in their focus on historical, sociocultural, or sociocognitive agendas for the contextualisation of micro analyses, among other aspects. Processes of distribution, however, have remained a rather underdeveloped notion in the field. Conceptually speaking, most CDS practitioners agree that key importance attaches to discussing distribution practices, including in-depth considerations of social, economic, and technical dimensions of institutions in control of communication industries, such as digital platforms or the press. The general, and largely implicit, agreement is that these dimensions constitute an essential part of the social and political context of discursive practices. For example, in the analysis of news discourses, there is (or should be) an account of the specific design of distribution practices via the press (see Richardson 2006 for an excellent example), including the reach, influence, and penetration of the discourses under study as well as a sociopolitical account of the institution of the press in that given context, covering media constraints and freedom of the press in (non-)democratic contexts. This is where the consideration of distribution processes has twofold value for CDS. On the one hand, it helps to establish how effective a meaning-making practice is in terms of discursive power, that is, who gets to influence how many and with what kind of cultural/political capital. On the other hand, it sheds light on how that distribution process sits as part of the wider social, cultural, and political context of the given society, for example, what kind of backlash may be faced by non-aligned or non-mainstream discourses. At the micro and meso levels of analysis, the focus on distribution processes is also about establishing important issues of genre and norms of practice for that particular meaning-making materiality. While genre theory and analysis originally built on Rhetoric and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to describe texts and their specific communicative purposes, the critical consideration of genre is important well beyond stylistic variations. It is, in fact, the determining aspect of choosing the right analytical tool for micro analysis of the data to hand. For instance, in analysing news discourse, it is of vital importance to know what the norms of practice are in a typical news story (news values, jargon, register, narrative schemata, etc.), so that one is able to make an informed explication of how the reader is being nudged more or less covertly. The same goes for any type of discursive data to hand, encompassing how the anchorage of text/ visuals normally works in advertising genres, how multimodality and mise-en-scène work in visual representation of movies, among

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other aspects. In most cases, the account of distribution processes at the local levels can be separated from the social and political impact of the distribution industry in the wider context. For example, in large studies on press discourses, local level dynamics of genre specification, textual structures, stylistics, etc. can be discussed separately from larger level issues of reach, histories, circulation numbers, democratic spaces, and operations etc., which can be accounted for as part of the social context.

Social media and distribution processes Social media have brought about a paradigmatic shift in communicative systems at the heart of conceptualisations in CDS, with implications for all three processes of production, consumption, and distribution. Some of these fundamental changes pose challenges for core CDS assumptions: for example, it is not clear how the concentration of discursive (communicative) power functions in the many-to-many interactive context of social media. Whether the meaning-making at hand is meant to be treated as mass communication or interpersonal communication, and how to account for the dynamic and multidirectional nature of impact and power are only two of the many, fundamental questions when it comes to developing a critical approach to digitally mediated discursive practice. As mentioned earlier, CDS is all about integrating processes of production, consumption, and distribution into the analysis of the meaning-making to hand, with a characteristic focus on text in context. There are two caveats here, though. One is that a narrow, logocentric notion of text is no longer adequate to speak about CDS as a broad umbrella term for various data types, genres, and modalities. In fact, this approach should be able to consider digital practice as well as various new digital affordances as part of materiality and/or sites of meaning-making (KhosraviNik 2020). Social media are, in fact, a suitable example of a communicative context where not only texts (whether intended as written language or as any tangible unit of data, such as a film or meme) are used in their linguistic and multimodal combinations, but also meanings are communicated through emerging native digital practices and engagements, such as regimes of likes, community support, shares, tags, hashtags, digital check-ins, etc. A relevant example could be how geolocation check-ins can be used as discursive resources for representations of social class (see Abernathy 2016; Peng 2020). Discourse, on the other hand, is still a robust reference notion which can be substantiated via various forms of meaning-making. Discourse, as a coherent network of representations, in Hall’s (1980) view can be sustained, constructed, reinforced, challenged, and reproduced via various communication strategies. In

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other words, the tools via which we communicate (language, visuals, symbols, and memes, as well as practices) still have a discursive function as they are commonly organised in a certain discourse formation. While the term discourse (or perhaps big-‘D’ Discourse, à la Gee 2011) is still very relevant to use across disciplines and approaches, the term text may be considered rather limited. There is, however, a specific form of the term discourse (or perhaps small-‘d’ discourse), which makes reference to the data (usually language) under analysis. For clarity of use, we suggest using the term meaning-making content & practices for what comes to be viewed as data or text in early CDA and the term discourse for what Gee refers to as big-‘D’ Discourse or structures of knowledge and representations in Foucauldian terms. This terminology choice is also motivated by the social media context itself, whose original and emerging genres of digital communication epitomise this integrated sense of meaning-making. The Social Media Communication (SMC) paradigm influences both the local-technical and wider-social levels of processes of distribution. At the local level, it is characterised by new genres, new meaning-making materials, and increasingly indigenous types of communication with a tangible impact on digital prosumers and the wider public. For example, in consideration of memes as a widespread and increasingly significant genre of communication, studies attend to the topical communication and main representation aspects, such as in digital right-wing populism in national contexts like the US as well as globally (see Ross and Rivers 2017). At the wider social level, there is increasing attention being paid to this textual genre in the context of a much broader cultural shift in communication, with supersimplification and sharp-edged judgements becoming the order of the day in contemporary political, social, and cultural debates (Wiggins 2019). As such, the issue of new genres is not only about the lag in CDS on such content but also about how these genres and practices may have impacted on wider society as the social/ cultural/ political contexts of producers and consumers. Related to this is also the application of appropriate tools and techniques in analysis, from multimodality to visual analysis, narrative, and storytelling (see Ghaffari 2020 for an example). From a more macro point of view, social media operations are now part of wider contexts beyond their internal technical operation. Social media are an integral part of the way we could/ should envisage overall democratic functions and their specific key trading of information and news. This has had implications across the classic, democratic principle of the fourth estate and related notions regarding the role of informed publics and watchdog journalism, among others. The political economy of social media and internal operating systems for controlling content and visibility, that is, the algorithmic regimentation of content and practices (KhosraviNik 2018, 2019), is a major area to account for in considering how and why digital discursive formations work the way they do.

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At the same time, the global context of social media use may be radically different in various countries. While in some less or undemocratic contexts social media may potentially serve to fill the gap towards the maintenance of a public sphere and foster connections to others, the political inclination of discursive practices online may also be harshly and intrusively interfered with by various forms of censorship and control. It is not easy to walk the line between a form of assumption of universality in social media use (eventually resulting in some form of media determinism) and acknowledgement of the essential differences in societies (eventually falling into the trap of a form of cultural essentialism). Nevertheless, social and political contextualisation of the case under investigation for a CDS study is to be regarded as essential for both digital and non-digital data. The two local and global levels of contexts discussed above are practically intertwined. There is common evidence of the impact of the wider context of politics on the details of the material under analysis, say, for example, in the ways codes, metaphors, and implicit triggers may be used or suppressed. At the same time, the logics of textual practice at the local level may influence the wider context of society, for example in the way the normalisation of meme communication may have contributed to the emergence of a meme culture in many political contexts. Yet CDS as a field is characterised by the overarching aim of connecting the micro to the macro and vice versa. It is about details of meaning-making at the very specific usage level as well as connecting emerging patterns of use at the macro level. In other words, it is about a core empirical focus against the backdrop of social critique. For social media CDS, this translates into an essential and indispensable connection between digital context and social context. It entails concentration on a discourse as it moves, interconnects, and structures a series of communication activities in a specific digital space and then links it to social level critique. A critical discursive perspective does not assume full overlap of the digital and societal, but at the same time it refrains from writing off the new features of digital communication as irrelevant. In other words, digital or not, the core focus of analysis in SM-CDS is on discourse, which functions as the thread that holds together the digital and the societal. This perhaps provides a good justification for an analytical postulation of a double contextualisation in SM-CDS (KhosraviNik 2017; KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018), in line with the trademark CDS principle of interdisciplinarity and the integration of digital theory and social theory. On the one hand, there is a horizontal contextualisation which attends to what goes on digitally and across an interrelated network of spaces and discursive points, and on the other hand a vertical contextualisation where results on the first level are contextualised within a societal network of (historical) discourses-in-place in that given society.

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In their range of diversity and impact, CDS scholars have been very effective in combining social theory in their analyses as a key defining characteristic. There is ample evidence that the critical aspirations of CDS are commonly upheld by focusing on the social ills under analysis, be it racism, misogyny, or any other exclusionary discourses, with an increasing volume of research also looking at digital data and discourses. However, digital theory is yet to be fully incorporated into these analyses, and the focus on digital methods, tools, and structural synergies between digital and social conceptualisations suffers from an (understandable) inertia. As explained above, the context of interpretation of meaningmaking content and practices can never be separated from the technological/ industrial aspects of distribution, which has considerable implications for the conceptual, methodological, and critical aspirations of CDS. While it is beyond the feasible scope of this single chapter to fill this gap, the following section is designed to contribute to this ongoing discussion and engage with some pertinent methods to explore social media data and their contextualisation for social scientific purposes.

New synergies and new research tools for SM-CDS With the growing popularity of social media content, different branches of Linguistics have imported their methodological traditions into the analysis of social media data. An example is Conversation Analysis, which has been applied to online interactions in multi-party chat rooms, forums, and one-to-one chat (Antaki et al. 2005; Berglund 2009; Schönfeldt & Golato 2003). Since a major characteristic of digital technologies is the capacity to generate and store data on a colossal scale, quantitative methods in Big Data have flourished in the field, in order to tackle social media data’s unprecedented (and intimidating) volume, variety and velocity. Similarly, Corpus Linguistic tools and methods have been widely used in analysing social media language (see for example McGlashan 2020). While the main thrust of analytical categories stems from linguistic developments in pragmatics, discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, CDS is exemplary in its diversity of applications and tools around the principle of methodological eclecticism. At the same time, from a digital CDS perspective, focusing on the indepth analysis of meaning-making in technological and social contexts, there has been little accounting for processes of distribution. As argued before, distribution processes are a key factor in social media discourse and the methodological operations should be able to account for the dynamic context of interactions on the horizontal level in order to provide a critical account of the data analysed. That is,

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for a social media CDS study, it is best to adopt and adapt tools from other fields that may fill the gaps within the CDS operational principle. Below, we aim to discuss three such methods and try to explain how they may sit well within a CDS research profile in the new digital environment.

Social network analysis and CDS The concept of Social Networks has been in use since the early 20th century to connote complex sets of social relationships on all scales, from interpersonal to international. Eminent precursors such as Georg Simmel and Émile Durkheim had already identified the “interweaving” and “webs” of connection between social actors (Carrington and Scott 2011). However, in the past three decades, Social Network Analysis (SNA) has emerged as a cross-disciplinary science in its own right, combining social, mathematical, statistical, and computer science tenets, and has in fact proven to be of even broader applicability beyond the purely social, extending to ecology, physics, genetics, computer science, and other domains. The development of an updated theory of social networks has brought about new qualitative and quantitative insights, introducing the innovative idea that social phenomena and relationships could be systematically investigated as forming networks or reticules of relations. At the heart of contemporary SNA is graph theory: a graph can be regarded as the representation of relations, where individual actors, people, or things within the network are represented by points (or nodes) and the social relationships or interactions between them are represented by lines (edges) (Scott 2017). The burgeoning interest in Social Network Analysis has only been strengthened by the advent of the Social Media Communication paradigm, as SNA can yield key insights for CDS preoccupations into how connection networks are built and how information/ messages circulate on social media. The age-old principle in discourse analysis (as the investigation of meaning-making beyond the content) is to consider these networks of relations, with particular reference to who is saying what to whom, and under what conditions. And while in media discourse studies the dynamics of producers and consumers are largely presupposed along the lines of mass media power (or explicitly accounted for by explaining the media industry, circulations, targeted audiences, ownerships, etc.), the notion of social networks can prove very useful when dealing with interactions on social media (KhosraviNik 2014). In fact, as we tackle digital discourses and technosocial phenomena, we are compelled to deal with the breakdown in the linearity of textual flows and foci of production and consumption of meaning-making arte-

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facts in the cybersphere. The dynamic of one-to-many communication, which has been the hallmark of textual practice in mass media and elite discourses, has now changed into a potential many-to-many dynamics of textual practices by countless numbers of ordinary prosumers in a fluid, circular, and unpredictable manner (KhosraviNik 2014). In this respect, if social media are the “new public square”, SNA enables us to map the various constituents of this space and their relations to each other (Smith et al. 2014). As such, a ‘node’ on social media can be represented by a single user on Twitter or Facebook as well as by a blog or a photo on Instagram. Nodes can take a variety of structural positions in a network, holding different types and levels of influence in terms of information flow, the more important ones being defined as “central”. In the same vein, examples of ‘edges’ include a “friendship” between two Facebook users, a follow relationship between two Twitter users, a hyperlink sent from one blog to another, or a common tag that two photos on Instagram share. By means of dedicated visualisation and exploration software (e.g. Node XL, Gephi), social network metrics provide a unique understanding of patterns of information flows. Levels and units of analysis vary and can include a node, an edge, a cluster, or the whole network. At the node level, degrees of centrality help to explain the extent to which an individual or organization is connected to others in their environment and support the identification of ‘influential’ users. At the edge level, we can identify the existence (or absence) of connections between nodes, their dynamic or static nature, their reciprocity and strength. At the cluster level, we can investigate density, centralisation, and reciprocity within smaller subgroups of densely interconnected users, smaller communities characterised by homophily, and where information flows more freely. The same can be applied to the network as a whole, where density, centralization, and reciprocity still represent the main measurements (Himelboim 2017). One of the main social applications of SNA involves tracking the online communication channels of violent and extremist groups across the world, as it provides a direct window into their online leadership and global relationships (Basu 2014). These are often regarded as reflecting and shaping the offline behaviour of such groups, while at the same time often being easier to access and survey (Veilleux-Lepage and Archambault 2019). However, while this approach is valuable in offering a macro perspective on patterns and shapes of social networks and the role of influential members, it may be fruitfully integrated with more in-depth, qualitative approaches on the content of these social relations and their underlying ideological values, in order to encompass both outsider and insider views of the social structure (Nooraie et al. 2020).

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An integration between SNA and discursive approaches, in fact, fosters a deeper understanding of the community under investigation. As maintained by Moser et al. (2013), although we might be able to gather massive, very detailed relational data on online communities, or a detailed topology of a network, this does not allude to what content is at stake or to the nature of the ties that bind the participants. Such data complement relational information with interpretive data grounded in discourse analysis in the investigation of online occupational communities. SNA is also employed to understand how digital content goes ‘viral’ (hence a sudden accumulation of discursive power), and the ways in which abusive content, misinformation, and fake news spread across the cybersphere. A fruitful example of an SNA integrated approach to digital virality is the work by Downing and Ahmed (2019), who reflect on #MacronLeaks, an episode of Internet-based electoral meddling on the eve of the 2017 French presidential election. Using SNA, the authors aim to unpack those actors who are influential in the online discussion and understand the implications of these clusterings for election meddling during blackout periods. Using CDS, they focus on the content of influential tweets to better understand the types of discussion that took place.

Sentiment analysis and CDS One of the main challenges of exploring opinions, sentiments, emotions, evaluations, beliefs, and speculations lies in the fact that all these can be regarded as “private states”, that is, not open to objective observation or verification (Quirk et al. 1985, see also Wiebe et al. 2005). From a linguistic perspective, the way we use language to convey such emotions, beliefs, and evaluations has been investigated from different angles, encompassing affect, subjectivity and point of view, evidentiality, attitudinal stance, modality and appraisal, to mention just a few (see Taboada 2016 for an overview). In recent years, this longstanding interest in the linguistic study of subjectivity and evaluation has been taken to the next level with the advent of the new social media communication paradigm. Self-presentation and emotional expression, in fact, have come to represent the focus of a considerable amount of research on digital media communication: a number of inherent features of computermediated communication (CMC) seem to encourage users to share with large audiences sentiments that are augmented in both quality and quantity. These include physical separation and the assumption of digital anonymity, as well as the resulting disinhibition, as the “apparent reduction in concern for self-presentation and the judgement of others” (Johnson 1998:44, as cited in Thurlow et al.

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2009: 62). In the same vein, other features which include invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and a blurring of private and public on social media platforms (boyd 2011), seem to foster an affective (rather than rational) nature for communication across the participatory web ecology, even on serious themes related to politics, economy, or the environment (see KhosraviNik 2018). The main argument is that social media spaces of interaction are prone to function on the principle of affective relatability rather than rational argumentation, a characteristic that contributes to the claims that social media are technologically designed for populist reciprocation (KhosraviNik 2019). The analysis of argumentation has long been part of CDS studies, with notable examples being the Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) and Pragma-Dialectic traditions, a focus which is grounded in the core theoretical conceptualisation of the public sphere and ideals of democratic deliberation, and that can be traced back to the impact of the Habermasian Theory of Communicative action, among others. However, it is increasingly agreed that, as a communication paradigm, deliberative argumentation is not a forte in the realm of social media, at least not in the same way as the argumentation that classically used to be viewed as a core element of political discourse. The politico-economic model of social media at the top level and the algorithmic operating systems which monetise digital content and engagements are the main factors underpinning the growing dominance of an affective ethos on social media discourses. The salience of subjectivity in the emerging social media communication paradigm has opened up the analysis of sentiment across different fields of enquiry. In particular, Sentiment Analysis (henceforth, SA) is increasingly being utilized to detect, extract, and classify opinions, sentiments, and attitudes on different topics, as it allows us to detect polarity (more or less ‘positive’, ‘neutral’, or ‘negative’) in social media content, ranging from a single word or sentence to an entire document. Also referred to as opinion mining, review mining, appraisal extraction, or attitude analysis, SA has become a key tool in digital marketing analytics, for observing public moods and understanding the opinions of the general public and consumers on social events, political movements, company strategies, marketing campaigns, product preferences, customer satisfaction, and monitoring reputations (Ravi and Ravi 2015). In particular, the growing interest in sentiment analysis has been fostered by the unprecedented growth of e-commerce, and its reliance on reviews posted by existing customers, and producers and service providers (Fang and Zhan 2015). The underlying rationale of sentiment analysis is to process a textual item based on its characteristics compared to existing information, so that an assessment can be made on whether it contains positive or negative sentiment. There

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are two leading approaches to this process, largely developed at the crossroads of linguistics and computer science. One is the lexicon-based method (LB), requiring a dictionary of words with a positive or negative sentiment value assigned to each of them. These dictionaries can be created manually or automatically. With every piece of text message represented as a bag of words, sentiment values from the dictionary are assigned to all positive and negative words or phrases within the message. A combining function, such as sum or average, is applied in order to make a final evaluation regarding the overall sentiment of the message (Ding et al., 2018; Taboada et al., 2011). The other is a machine learning method (ML), where a (labelled) training data set of other items (sentences, documents, etc.) is used by the algorithm to build classifiers (Ahmad et al. 2017). This is referred to as supervised learning, because the classifier is given direction in terms of what are good or bad examples of the class and learns that certain characteristics distinguish a positive from a negative text. In turn, this makes it possible for the classifier to determine the polarity of new texts and identify sentiments (see Verma and Thakur 2018 for details). When applied to social media data, SA brings two main advantages. First, as previously mentioned, SA allows an in-depth exploration of subjectivity as a key dimension on social media platforms grounded in the acts of liking or disliking content. Secondly, the affordances of SA tools allow us to account for constantly accumulating, massive sets of data (and their sentiments) as the actions on social media generate high-volume, high-velocity, high-variety, high-value, highvariability data. As textual data still constitute almost 80% of Internet data, existing software, such as Datasift, Crimson Hexagon, or SentiStrenght, which supports the rapid analysis of large corpora, is particularly valuable. Machine-assisted accounts of meanings are, however, limited in their interpretation of content despite the fact that systems are constantly being improved. As is the case with any quantitative (largely de-contextualised) analysis of meaning-making, both LB and ML methods show limitations when processing complex, ambiguous, or culture-specific material such as colloquialisms or sarcasm. For example, it is unlikely for a sexist insult like “Go back to the kitchen!” to be flagged as ‘negative’ by a basic sentiment analysis tool. At the same time, both wordlists and training data set can be customised to perform in a more effective way, although it may prove more time and/or budget-consuming than expected. When it comes to SA’s applicability in the context of a broader critical discursive approach, we must take into account the existing debate on the linguistic limitations of this methodology of analysis. For example, SA has been criticised for its lack of linguistic theory and its limited understanding of language in use (Taboada 2016). However, given the specific affective context of social media, we still think it can prove to be a useful tool as part of the analytical toolkit of dig-

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ital discourse analysis. For example, SA can fruitfully complement a critical discursive approach to digital data, especially in the exploration of political ideology. Social media platforms, in fact, have become a central site where people express their opinions and views on political parties and candidates. Wang et al. (2012) describe a system for real-time analysis of public sentiment towards presidential candidates in the 2012 U.S. election as expressed on Twitter. Emerging events or news are often followed almost instantly by a burst in Twitter volume, providing a unique opportunity to gauge the relation between expressed public sentiment and electoral events and explore how these events affect public opinion. Another crucial area of investigation where SA approaches are currently being applied is that of hostility in the cybersphere. In particular, with the variety and velocity of social media data making it almost impossible to control all of their content, various technologies cater for the necessity to detect such speech automatically and filter any content that presents hateful language (see Schmidt and Wiegand 2017 for an overview). For example, Watanabe et al. (2018) proposed a machine-learning approach to automatically detect hate speech patterns and the most common unigrams and use this information, along with sentiment-related and semantic features, to classify tweets into hateful, offensive, or clean, with an accuracy of 78.4%. The quantitative affordances of SA methods make it possible to answer complex research questions, such as how and to what degree social, ethnic, sexual, and gender minorities may be at the receiving end of hate speech on social media. Lingiardi et al. (2020) report the findings of the ‘Italian Hate Map’ project, which used a lexicon-based method of semantic content analysis to discover that women were the most insulted group on Twitter, having received 60.4% of negative geolocalised tweets, followed by immigrants, gay and lesbian persons, Muslims, Jews, and disabled persons. Such studies, though, would be enriched by the integration of a critical stance accounting for an in-depth qualitative discursive analysis of the context of these insulting messages, as well as from a double critical contextualization of research findings at both digital participatory as well as social and cultural levels (see KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018). SA has, nevertheless, strong potential to function as a specific tool to deal with the genre-specific nature of digital discursive content.

Digital ethnography and CDS With ethnography being “the art and science of describing a group or culture” (Fetterman 1989: 1), its trademark focus on human routines, beliefs, and customs in shared environments has been increasingly translated into the digital sphere, to

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the point that “it is no longer imaginable to conduct ethnography without considering online spaces” (Hallett and Barber 2014: 307). At the same time, it has been far from straightforward to broaden the horizons of one of the oldest qualitative research methods, originating in 19th century anthropology, to embrace such a complex, dispersive, and disembodied realm as the cybersphere. In the past two decades, methodological terms (and related approaches) have flourished, to include “netnography” (Kozinets 2015), “cyberethnography” (Ward 1999), “virtual ethnography” (Hine 2000, which she later rephrased as “ethnography for the Internet”, 2015), and “digital ethnography” (Murthy 2008), to name but a few (for a terminology overview see Tunçalp and Lê 2014). While some researchers have argued for finer distinctions, others regard these as synonymous terms or promote the use of umbrella terms such as “Investigative Research on the Internet (IRI)” (Lugosi et al. 2012) to refer to a qualitative, ethnographic research method applied to the digital sphere. One critical note here is that these developments, while grounded in the intradisciplinary circle of ethnography, show considerable degrees of variation. Many approaches focus on the ethnography of (digital) use and practices offline, being grounded in the principle of “non-digital centric-ness” (Pink et al. 2016). Much of the research in ethnography and the digital focuses on the “embedded, embodied and everyday” (Hine 2015) nature of the digital as part of our spectacularly complex worlds and sets out to explore how the unprecedented openness and potential for multiplicity of the digital has embedded itself into the material, sensory, and social worlds we inhabit. In parallel, there are conversations and developments in theory and methods around the way the digital has incurred complications for ethnographic research itself, e.g., in its time-space framework and the role of the ethnographer in the research process (see Caliandro 2018). In the meantime, for some others, the focal point has shifted to any form of online data available and mediated interactions vs the traditions of face-to-face interaction. This means there is a strong ethnographic concentration on those communities that originated and developed primarily in the digital sphere as the entry point of research. This has resulted in a need for a re-conceptualisation of some core concepts in ethnography such as “field” and “fieldwork” (Airoldi 2018), as well as readjustments to the identification and collection practices around the main four traditional sources of ethnographic data, i.e., archival data, elicited data, interviews, and fieldnotes. Guidelines and step-by-step methods are being developed in an attempt to establish a systematic approach with the capacity to address many of the procedural, ethical, and methodological issues specific to online research, while taking into account the need for several transdisciplinary integrations. Kozinet’s (2010, 2015) guidelines around “netnography” are a good example of such adaptation, as they encompass a procedural analytical frame

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for the digital world, including planning, entrée, data collection, interpretation/ analysis, etc. It is crucial to clarify that, in considering digital ethnography as part of a CDS toolkit, SM-CDS is not calling for a fully-fledged ethnographical turn (KhosraviNik 2017). Instead, it is to argue that, as part of the explication of the local-technological context of discursive formation and consumption, a digital ethnographical approach to screen data (Androutsopolos 2013) and practices would be very useful and, indeed, effective. Digital ethnography for SM-CDS, in fact, is about accounting for the horizontal level of discursive practice, which can then be critically and vertically contextualised within the structures of discoursesin-place in society, as per the notion of double contextualisation (KhosraviNik 2017). A discourse-oriented digital ethnography of what goes on across digital spaces would not only help to identify, define, and categorise meaning-making content and practices available as data, but also provide key insights into the technological and media level contexts of processes meaning-making, as well as helping to account for the horizontal local characteristics of content and practices. A main part of this observational endeavour would be to consider discursive dynamics online and the ways in which technological affordances may practically be used by the discourse community under investigation. In other words, the ethnographic phase in SM-CDS will align with “discourse-centred online ethnography”, a term introduced by Jannis Androutsopolos in his excellent 2008 work, albeit intended as a full start-to-end research process. A major thrust in arguing for the integration of an observational/ ethnographic phase in SM-CDS is that there should be no separation between data and their context of production and consumption. In the traditions of CDS, discourse has also been defined as text and context together (Cook 2001). There is ample and emerging potential in integrating various tools, software, and methods to identify, categorise, and collect relevant data, and there is a strong nudge in that direction in the field. However, this should be justified and operationalised carefully, as a simple webscraping endeavour would run the risk of decontextualised analysis of collected content and missing out on the rich dynamic of meaningmaking at various levels. It is worth recalling that the CDS interest in ethnography should be understood as a long-standing aspect of its transdisciplinary connections, largely predating the focus on the digital sphere. The ongoing dialogue between ethnographic and critical discursive methods is grounded in a shared, problemoriented, and context-sensitive research approach to discourse and society (see Catalano and Waugh 2020). In fact, Wodak (2009) incorporated ethnographic methods into the DHA as a crucial way to contextualize CDS research (see also

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Krzyż anowski 2011; Wodak and Savski 2018). Also, Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999: 62) value ethnographic methods to explore “the beliefs, values and desires” of participants, as well as how social relations are reproduced, and inequalities are perpetuated, through discourse by social actors in their immediate social context. It should also be mentioned that the longstanding and well-rooted research inspired by Scollon, with specific reference to critical literacy studies and the concept of “discourse in action”, as well as the focus on discourse as a digital practice (Jones et al. 2014; Norris and Jones 2005), are substantial inspirations in this line of development for digital CDS. As far as the digital context is concerned, the aforementioned work by Androutsopoulos (2008) has the merit of having outlined, as early as 2008, the aims and procedures, as well as potentials and limitations, of “discourse-centred online ethnography” (DCOE). Partially based on Herring’s Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (2004), Androutsopoulos’ approach is more firmly grounded in sociolinguistics rather than in discursive critique. As such, the researcher must engage with online texts and environments as dynamic flows, where systematic observation of digital communication and semiotic production is paired with a second dimension of direct contact with a selection of digital social actors, such as by means of semi-structured interviews conducted face-to face or on the telephone. DCOE has inspired SM-CDS in its systematic, discourse-oriented ethnographic observation of the digital sphere as an essential, preliminary step to data collection and analysis. Regardless of the specific research questions and objectives, in fact, an immersive ethnographic observation of the actual processes of production and consumption of social media content supports the identification of its volatile debates and discourse concentrations. To be able to capture the interactivity, connectivity, and always-on nature of social media communication, being an active observer (and user) on different social media platforms is essential for the identification of relevant foci of data, especially if observation is semistructured by practice-derived guidelines (see Androutsopoulos 2008). With counter-discourses of activism and protest being a long-standing field of interest for CDS scholars, an ethnographically informed SM-CDS approach has strong potential for the exploration of the new and emerging spaces for discussion made available by the global advocacy and networking affordances of Web 2.0. Gerbaudo (2012) and Al Zidjaly (2019), for example, argue in favour of longitudinal ethnographic studies of digital activism which take bottom-up digital practices, or “mediated actions”, as the unit of analysis for the investigation of larger discourses. An ethnographic, critical discursive look can further highlight the role played by linguistic ideologies and indexicality in the emergence and silencing of political movements through the multimodal recontextualisation of local and

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global texts in algorithmically-enhanced digital processes (Sinatora 2020; Sinatora this volume). It also offers a glimpse at the trajectory of these social movements, whose digital presence is in constant development, in dialogue with other local, regional, and global social movements (Esposito and Sinatora 2022). When focusing on social movements, the added value of digital ethnographic, observational methods for SM-CDS supports the identification and critical explanation of digitally-originated communicative practices and trends grounded in the share-and-repeat mechanisms of virality. An example is the phenomenon often labelled as “hashtag activism”, a term used to describe networks of social media messages that use a common hashtagged term, aimed at the propagation of a social claim and the ultimate creation of “counterpublics” or alternative public spheres (Downey and Fenton 2003). Famous examples include hashtags linked to key social phenomena of the last decade, such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. Reflecting on “hashtag activism” and its primacy in the digital (and social) sphere, Bonilla and Rosa (2015) focused on #Ferguson and the related #If TheyGunnedMeDown as two hashtags grounded in a critique of the negative stereotypes in mainstream newspaper coverage of the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. As such, they questioned the possibility of the existence of “Hashtag Ethnography” as a methodology to navigate the intertextual and interdiscursive chains originated by the hashtag itself, while at the same time carefully taking into account the variety of uses, and stances and perspectives, associated with any given use of the same hashtag. Grounded in a refreshing acknowledgement of Twitter as being far from an “unproblematized” public sphere, Bonilla and Rosa’s reflections resonate strongly within a SM-CDS paradigm, which should aim for the critical exploration of intersectional inequalities along the online-offline continuum. And while hashtags may only ever offer a limited, partial, and filtered view of a social world, this does not entail “abandoning them as sites of analysis”, but rather “valuing them as entry points into larger and more complex worlds” (Bonilla and Rosa 2015:7). A rigorous researcher with a critical aim should feel inspired to step past that entry point and place those hashtags (and related users) within a broader sociocommunicative context.

Concluding remarks While arguing in favour of an effective, fruitful, and indeed essential CDS approach to digitally mediated discursive practices, this chapter has sought to demonstrate the theoretical and methodological necessity of adapting CDS to digital realities, calling for synergies and interdisciplinary integration. While var-

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ious studies and collections have tried to take into account these needs in the past few years, this particular contribution has tried to explain how (and why) the methods and approaches discussed could be incorporated into a given CDS research project in response to the changes in the dynamics of distribution of discourses on social media. The chapter makes a case for considering the resident, key notion of processes of distribution in traditions of CDS and the postulations it has carried within itself in recent decades of CDS scholarship. While there have been comfortable assumptions in the past about the dynamics of discursive distribution along the lines of uniformity of media and society dynamics in traditional media, digital media dynamics has made a paradigmatic shift at the crossroads of interpersonal and mass communication. This not only calls for a reconsideration of the working notions in CDS, but also impacts on the genre of the meaning-making content and practices to be analysed. The changes in social media discourse extend from uncharted territories in terms of media technological ecology to cover the type and genre of meaning making artefacts; the methods discussed respond to both aspects in terms of arguments for their usefulness and relevance. In discussing Social Network Analysis, we are trying to engage with the shortcomings of the existing CDS framework in light of the new digital dynamics of meaning-making flows. We are arguing that because a key CDS aspect is to understand the symbolic and discursive power of the content under analysis, we need a tool to provide some form of visualisation of the interconnectedness and concentrations of impact circles, to analyse the spread of certain discourses. In other words, we need to see who is interacting with whom, with what intensity and in what conditions, on a specific discourse topic and, indeed, how these networks work towards increasing the digital visibility and virality of certain content. Visualisation of this dynamics not only helps to decipher the spread but also unpacks the causal claims to authenticity and ordinariness of digital utterances and interactions that are the hallmark of social media genres. It shows how and why certain forms of triggers are strategically spread to target audiences under the guise of casual, personal, and even recreational content. In discussing Sentiment Analysis, we are responding to the specificity of the genre of content used on social media, along the lines of arguments for the affective nature of social media meaning-making. This is where we postulate that certain macro-industrial structures (such as political-economic models of monetisation practices of social media, valorisation of the attention economy, ownership and consolidation of digital data and footprints, algorithmic steering and manipulation, etc.) have worked hand in hand in popular claims for social media affordances (removal of gate keeping, full personal access to freedom of expression, giving voice to marginalised groups, etc.) to create a highly affective mean-

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ing making arena which is prone to nudge the prosumer towards populist styles of communication (KhosraviNik 2019), or even outright hostility (KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018). Affectivity is about relatability and emotions, whereas in some specific domains of modern discourse, such as politics, argumentation has been theorised as the core value. Sentiment Analysis could prove to be very useful in gauging these genre-specific characteristics of online content, despite the caveats in its application to CDS analysis. In discussing digital ethnography, we respond to arguments on double contextualisation claims for SM-CDS. While many CDS studies on social media would involve some form of systematic observation of the data fields in one way or another, the argument here is to embrace this phase of research as an integral part of the study. In fact, this phase has the potential to provide rich insights into communicative dynamics at the technological level, including the ways in which relevant data are identified and perhaps collected. Most importantly, it also allows us to avoid the pitfall of decontextualising data analysis in the digital sphere. While disciplinary lines in Linguistic/ Discourse Analysis and Media Studies may require more emphasis on the data and context, respectively, it is important to note that CDS should ideally bridge the gap between the two in order to fulfil its principles. It is also important to note that this is about the incorporation of certain insights from the vast field of ethnography, as a way of encountering the field and data, rather than a general call for an ethnographic overhaul of CDS. Lastly, it is pertinent to mention that these are mere attempts to open up the field to new methodological synergies. Such an exploration of new synergic studies of discourse and digital media carried out in various disciplines brings with it a high level of excitement and potential. Yet, the central tenet is that such synergies should aspire to account for the broadly techno-discursive structure of digital discourse. In doing that, while some, including the authors, are willing to reach out to Media and Technology scholarship, there are also studies going in the opposite direction, trying to synergise discourse and discourse studies into their social media research (see for example Dillet 2020). With both directions showing equally encouraging potential, this makes for promising and exciting opportunities for cross-disciplinary research.

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Dillet, Benoît. 2020. “Speaking to Algorithms? Rhetorical Political Analysis as Technological Analysis.” Politics. Online First. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395720968060 Ding, J., Hailong Sun, Xu Wang, and Xudong Liu. 2018. “Entity-level Sentiment Analysis of Issue Comments.” SEmotion ’18: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Emotion Awareness in Software Engineering 7–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3194932.3194935 Downey, John, and Natalie Fenton. 2003. “New Media, Counter Publicity and the Public Sphere.” New Media & Society 5 (2): 185–202. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444803005002003 Downing, Joseph, and Wasim Ahmed. 2019. “#MacronLeaks as a ‘Warning Shot’ for European Democracies.” French Politics 17 (3): 257–278. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41253-019-00090-w

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Digital practice as discriminatory discourse Technological meaningmaking, affect, and representation of Henan people on Chinese news portals Altman Yuzhu Peng University of Warwick

This chapter incorporates and draws on the concept of affect to examine how users’ discursive practices are reshaped by the design of interactive digital platforms. An affective critical discourse analysis approach is developed to analyse the affective-discursive loop by using Internet users’ practice of regional discriminatory discourses against Henan people as a case study. Through a comparison between users’ differing practices on two major Chinese news portals – Tencent and NetEase – this chapter reveals the extent to which regional discrimination is amplified by the locative IPaddress function of NetEase news portal’s user commentary system. This chapter makes a methodological contribution in response to the CDS notion of discursive power in the digital realm.

Introduction Across the globe, discrimination, which can take a gender-, ethnicity-, religion-, or region-related form (Dufwenberg and Muren 2006; KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018; Peng 2022), has always been a significant issue influencing the harmony of contemporary society. With the widespread penetration of digital communication technologies, which facilitate user-generating content, participatory digital platforms have, among positive opportunities, opened up “new and multifarious channels for the proliferation of hate” (KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018: 46). The new channels of meaning-making extend beyond mere language content as the classic source of CDS studies. This phenomenon presents methodological challenges to the field of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), which once overlooked the intersection of discourse and technology in people’s everyday practices (KhosraviNik 2018; 2017).

https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.100.03pen © 2023 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Building on KhosraviNik’s (2018; 2017) scholarship on the techno-discursive design of digital communication, this chapter develops an affective critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach to address the way in which Internet users’ discursive practices are modulated by the technological architecture of digital communication platforms. Affect refers to the “outcome of the encounter between entities”, which explains how “entities are affected by these encounters” (Ash 2015, 84). An affect may reshape people’s everyday practices by opening up their bodies to new capacities for action. By incorporating and drawing on the concept of affect, I argue that Internet users’ discourse practices are modulated through an affective process. In such a process, the design of the platform functions as facilitator, enforcer, and content creator, leading to the emergence of news communication dynamics, which have been overlooked by classic CDS literature. To unpack this affective-discursive loop, this chapter uses regional discrimination on Chinese news portals as a case study to articulate how the design of these news portals’ user commentary systems may amplify Internet users’ practice of regional discriminatory discourses. Regional discrimination, which takes the form of discrimination against a social group based on its members’ place of origin, is particularly important in Chinese society (Zhang 2013). People from inland provinces, such as Henan, are common victims of regional discrimination; this is evident in a large number of biased comments against Henan people that circulat in the commentary systems of popular news portals (Wei 2015). News portals are a form of websites, which aggregate original news content from the mass media (NetEase 2016). All Chinese news portals provide commentary systems, which enable users to generate comments under a news article (Qian 2011). The commentary system is built with digital communication technologies, which facilitate peer-to-peer interactions through user-generated content. The commentary system of major Chinese news portals has become an important venue for Internet users’ practice of discriminatory discourse against Henan people (Wei 2015). While the existing literature tends to understand regional discrimination as a form of socially constitutive/ conditioned discursive practice, a lack of scholarly attention has been paid to the technological rationale behind Chinese users’ practice of these discourses. In the case study, I analysed user comments under the news coverage of an incident retrieved from the commentary systems of two major Chinese news portals, Tencent and NetEase. In 2015, the Tencent and NetEase news portals were ranked the 7th and 36th “most accessed [Chinese] sites”, respectively (Fuchs 2016: 20). NetEase’s commentary system incorporates an IP-address function, which automatically displays users’ physical location alongside their comments (Qian 2011). No such function exists in Tencent’s commentary system. By comparing users’ discursive practices on Tencent and NetEase, respectively, I reveal

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how the debates between users from different regions are escalated by the integration of this IP-address function in the commentary system. This escalation is based on the sociocultural grounding of regional discrimination against Henan people but also showcases how the design of the comment system amplifies this kind of discriminatory practice by users. In the following sections, I first contextualise the formation of regional discrimination by elaborating its relationship to Chinese people’s place identity. Next, I critically review the existing literature on regional discrimination and then explain my theoretical approach to this phenomenon. After introducing the data collection and study methods, I present my empirical data analysis by examining the intersection of user comments, sociocultural context, and the design of the news portal commentary system. This analysis enables a better understanding of the dynamics between discursive practice and the locative design of social media technologies in the context of mediated communication in the digital age.

Contextualising regional discrimination against Henan people Collective identity is the “basis of human life” and “crucial to living with others across the complex boundaries of difference” (James 2015: 175). It comprises a sensitivity of place, since the construction of place reflects how “people are emotionally bound to their material environment” (Tuan 1996: 451–452). In China, such a connection has been historically constituted as is evident in the organisation of clan associations for fellow business persons from the same province in its ancient history (Valussi 2015). Since the establishment of the communist regime, the connection between place and the collective identity of Chinese people has been further institutionalised by the hukou (household registration) system. This system requires all Chinese people to register with the local authority where they were born (Wong, Li, and Song 2007). A person’s access to social welfare and benefits is restricted if they do not hold a local hukou (ibid). The hukou system, which to a certain extent binds people from the same province/ cities together, continues to stunt the geographical mobility of the Chinese population (Wong, Li, and Song 2007). The place identity of Chinese people constructs different social groups based on different places of origin. This identity difference feeds into contemporary regional discriminatory discourses following a post-reform rationale: since the late 1970s, the Chinese government has initiated a market-oriented reform of the economic sector, leading to the acceptance of capitalistic moralities by the general public (Rofel 2007). Since then, the pursuit of wealth has become glorified, and one’s social value has become measured by one’s annual income. The acceptance

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of this capitalist morality has shifted the responsibility of social wellbeing from the government to the individual (Peng 2020). Poverty is now viewed as a consequence of laziness and is associated with immoral activities. In particular, this discrimination against the poor is often regionally organised because of the Chinese government’s imbalanced economic policies: the regime, which views the economic development of the East as a priority, provides eastern provinces with more favourable policies than their inland counterparts (Fleisher, Li, and Zhao 2010). These eastern provinces, where the annual income of local households is the highest in the country, are built up and have become the most developed part of China (Fleisher, Li, and Zhao 2010). While this imbalanced economic growth provides residents of the eastern provinces with more opportunities to access material prosperity, living in these provinces has become associated with a ‘privileged’ social status (Fleisher, Li, and Zhao 2010). This association widens the gap between Chinese people from two areas. It provides the socio-economic grounding for eastern residents’ discrimination against their inland compatriots. Henan is the most populous inland province, with more than half of its population employed in the low-income rural economy (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2020). In order to improve their standard of living, many peasants move from inland rural areas to eastern cities, becoming migrant workers employed in the construction industry (Wong, Li, and Song 2007). This rural-urban migration renders Henan the most labour-exporting province. However, the hukou system exerts a negative impact on Henan migrant workers’ urban life, and most of them continue to suffer from poor living conditions after reallocating to eastern cities (Wong, Li, and Song 2007). Those of typical Henan origin, whom eastern citydwellers encounter every day, are often these disadvantaged migrant workers. Contextualising within a post-reform society, wherein poverty is almost equal to ‘immorality’, the large numbers of Henan migrant workers, alongside the entire Henan population, have become the social group most vulnerable to regional discrimination in contemporary China (Zhang 2013). They are often verbally abused by people from other parts of the country, especially in eastern regions (Wei 2015). Discrimination against Henan people is not the only form of regional discrimination within China;1 however, it is the most representative, given the public attention it attracts. This regional discrimination has migrated to the digital realm based on the widespread penetration of digital communication technologies (Wei 2015).

1. Some other regional groups, such as people from the Northeast, are also notably discriminated against.

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Participatory culture and digital communication Digital communication technologies describe a wide range of Internet-based services facilitating user-generated content (boyd 2014). The global diffusion of digital communication technologies has created a participatory culture, encouraging users to exchange ideas with others on various digital platforms (boyd 2014). Optimistic views suggest that this participatory culture has constructed a digital public sphere (Jenkins 2006). This scholarship follows Habermas’ (1991) notion of a public sphere, defining the Internet as an abstract, conceptual venue where users are assembled to discuss important issues in a sensible manner (Peng 2020). However, sceptics of the digital public sphere argue that it is an idealised concept, mainly because the assemblage of users is always institutionally pre-structured (Rod and Weidmann 2015). In contemporary China, the digital public sphere is remarkably pre-structured by the government’s censorship (Rod and Weidmann 2015). From the “Great Firewall”, which blocks ‘sensitive’ content/ websites (e.g. Google, Facebook, and Twitter), to cyber-cops, who monitor key digital communication platforms (e.g., WeChat and Weibo), and paid Internet commentators, who are compensated to lead public opinion, the regime has developed the world’s most sophisticated censorship system, which heavily influences Chinese users’ use of the Internet (Peng and Chen 2021; Peng et al. 2021, 2022). However, a diversity of voices is still allowed on the Chinese Internet, as long as those voices do not encourage civil disobedience, as research shows that the main purpose of censorship is to prevent collective protests against the party-state (King, Pan, and Roberts 2013). Taking the form of conflicts between citizens themselves, regional discrimination shows little relevance to criticisms of the government; thus, is not targeted by the government’s censorship. Consequently, the formation of this phenomenon involves significant influences from the market-oriented media within the present socio-economic context.

Media discourse and regional discrimination State-owned media continue monopolising the news publishing industry in contemporary China. However, the notable decrease in government subsidies since the 1990s has created large numbers of state-owned, yet market-oriented media (Huang 2016). These market-oriented media, which tend to practise sensational journalism and show a notable resemblance to the tabloid press in the West, are more popular with the general public than their propaganda-oriented counterparts (Huang 2016). Focusing on market-oriented media, existing literature has examined the extent to which media discourses facilitate the penetration of regional discrimination in Chinese society (Zhang 2013). For instance, in a textual

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analysis of the news produced by market-oriented media, Zhang (2013) suggests that discrimination against Henan people is influenced by biased media discourses, which repeatedly construct negative stereotypes of people from the province. Discourse is a socially constitutive/ conditioned practice of language (Fairclough 2003). Media discourses, which refers to the discursive practices of the mass media, are important to the construction of people’s “collective mentalities” (KhosraviNik 2014: 512). These constantly influence the audience’s cognitive perception of a social group by constructing stereotypes of that group (KhosraviNik 2014). Such stereotypes, which endure over time, become socially constructed impressions of the group by describing individual members of the group as homogenised (McGarty, Yzerbyt, and Spears 2002). Thus, these stereotypes do “not so much aid understanding, but aid misunderstanding”; they often misrepresent the social group by arbitrarily stressing the individualised characteristics or behaviours of its members (McGarty, Yzerbyt, and Spears 2002: 4). Dishonesty is one of the representative, negative stereotypes of Henan people. As Zhang (2013) notes, this stereotype is promoted by market-oriented media in their reports of fraud crimes: outside Henan province, market-oriented media tend to emphasise the place of origin of Henan suspects by describing the fraud suspects as “Henan frauds”. Such a referential instance attributes the dishonest characteristics of a small number of Henan suspects to a general quality shared by the entire Henan population (Wei 2015). It constructs a “dishonest” stereotype that has a wider impact on the reputation of Henan origins (Zhang 2013). This negative stereotype is constantly invoked by non-Henan users in their discriminatory practice against this particular social group (Wei 2015). The existing literature on regional discrimination is significantly influenced by the paradigm of critical discourse studies (CDS). CDS examines the power relations embedded in the meaning-making process of any kind in our everyday lives (KhosraviNik 2017). Critical discourse analysis (CDA) represents the most representative, text-driven CDS research method; it scrutinises how language use is framed within a specific socio-cultural context (KhosraviNik 2017). This method examines the “ways that processes of production impact on what can and cannot be written” (Baker, Gabrielatos, and McEnery 2013: 259). Fairclough (2003), provides a well-known three-dimensional model to analyse the linguistic elements of media content at the textual, discursive, and sociocultural levels, respectively. Using this CDA method, KhosraviNik (2014) scrutinises the linguistic features of five influential news reports on refugees in the UK; his research has uncovered how biased British newspapers relate migrants, such as asylum seekers, to negative stereotypes in their coverage of immigration issues.

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The CDA method has been proven useful for the study of biases embedded in media discourse across different sociocultural contexts (Fairclough 2003). However, emphasising a sociocultural interpretation, this method traditionally does not pay due attention to the nuanced interplay between discourses and the technological architecture that modulates the discursive practice (KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018; KhosraviNik 2018). Based on user-generated content, the participatory culture of digital communication technologies has redefined/ restructured mediated communications by supporting a “non-linear, decentralised process of textual production” (Peng 2021: 4). The dynamics between users’ discursive practice and the design of digital communication platforms are prominent in this process (KhosraviNik 2017). In the context of contemporary China, regional discrimination has increasingly been characterised as the verbal abuse of disadvantaged social groups, by some Internet users, on digital communication platforms, such as the commentary systems of news portals (Wei 2015). A renewed search for a methodological approach is necessary in order to address the technologicalcultural entwinement of the rationale behind this phenomenon.

Affective CDA Under the CDS rubric, an emerging body of literature continues to employ a CDA approach to analyse the mediated communication occurring on digital communication platforms (KhosraviNik 2018; Kelsey 2015; KhosraviNik 2017). However, this scholarship has increasingly incorporated an affective approach to address the interplay between the production of user-generated content and the technological architecture of the platforms (KhosraviNik 2018). According to Deleuze (1988), affect is defined as the “outcome of the encounter between entities”; and it describes how “entities are affected by these encounters” (Ash 2015: 84). Human emotions can be affected by the human body’s encounters with its surroundings (Wetherell 2012). For instance, a sad song may deeply affect a person; the person’s affective experience leads to their emotion of sadness, causing an affective responses such as crying. An affect opens up the affected to “new capacities for action”, which reshape their everyday practice (Peng 2021). Two concepts, “material thresholds” and “associated milieus” (Ash 2015: 84), help to articulate the process through which people’s everyday practices are affected by their use of technologies. Material thresholds refer to the limits that determine the potential affects a technology can generate (Ash et al. 2018). It is shaped by the design of the technology, which defines its capacity for enhancing affective production. Yet, affects cannot work “outside of an […] ecological context” (Ash 2015: 85). The associated milieus describe the ecological contexts in

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which the generation/ transmission of affects is facilitated (Ash 2015). For instance, research on High-Cost Short-Term Credit websites by Ash and his colleagues (2018) shows that designers endow these websites with a material threshold, i.e. technological design (e.g., incorporating sliders into its interface design), to encourage customers to use their products. The material threshold of websites, however, can only make sense when users are in need of financial assistance and start browsing websites in specific scenarios (Ash et al. 2018). Affect theory is often understood as an approach that primarily analyses the pre-discursive process of bodily experience (Clough 2008; Massumi 2002). However, Wetherell (2012: 7) argues that there is an affective-discursive loop, describing the intersection of people, affective experience, and discursive practice. In general, one’s discourse actions are intended to affect others with whom one engages in “communicative processes and exchanges” (Kelsey 2015: 4–5). An affective process can articulate “how actions and discourses affect participants and how those affects stimulate other discursive mechanisms” (Kelsey 2015: 5). As such, an affective approach is compatible with CDS (KhosraviNik 2018). An affective CDA method, which provides an account of the affective-discursive loop of users’ content generation on digital communication platforms (Wetherell 2012), helps to overcome the sociocultural determinism embedded in the traditional CDA research paradigm (KhosraviNik 2018).

Affect-technology dynamics on Chinese news portals As digital communication platforms, Chinese news portals incorporate a commentary system, allowing users to generate original content under each news report published on the websites (Qian 2011). This commentary system constitutes an important material threshold that turns the websites into affective networks via which affects are circulated through the exchange of comments between users (Peng 2021). One form of affect, namely attentive affect, has emerged as notable in influencing Chinese users’ discursive practice in the commentary system. According to Stiegler (2010), attention is the result of the capture and holding of one’s perception or flow of consciousness. People live in a world in which their attention is constantly modulated by a complex combination of factors in their everyday encounters with their surroundings. These factors continue to influence people’s conscious/ unconscious and voluntary/ involuntary actions. By incorporating what is referred to as ‘floor-building’, the commentary system of Chinese news portals visualises an original comment – and its responses – in a ‘block’ of dialogue. Users are able to reply to a comment by referencing it (Qian 2011). A ‘block’ of dialogue expands as more users participate in the discussion. This ‘floor-building’ feature has the capacity to generate attentive affects, which invite

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users to pay attention to others’ comments and reply to them. Because a news portal is accessible to all Chinese Internet users, individual users may easily engage in conversations with others across the country. The commentary system of some news portals, such as NetEase, supports a unique IP-address function, which displays users’ physical location alongside their comments (Qian 2011). This material threshold facilitates the generation of a locality-specific attentive affect; it encourages users to pay attention to each other’s physical presence in a place by presenting their locative information as a salient aspect of their participation in the commentary system. Such a mechanism has important self-representation implications: self-representation involves the conscious or unconscious use of signs and symbols in one’s identity articulation (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2012). On digital communication platforms, users establish their identities by using available digital symbols (boyd 2014). This digitised self-representation led to an assumption that users’ identities could be disconnected from their physical presence (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2012). Such an assumption has, however, collapsed in the era in which locative services are prevalently used: by using GPS or IP-address recognition technologies to detect a terminal device on a digital map, various locative services create an affirmative interaction between user-generated content and the place at which it is generated (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2012). The emergence of these services has added a locative dimension to digital communication users’ self-representation (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2012). The IP-address function provided by NetEase is certainly different from the locative function of social media platforms. Based on IP-address recognition technologies, this function displays the locative information of a user, which specifies only the province and/or the city in which s/he is currently situated. This locative information is automatically attached to a user’s comment (Qian 2011), meaning that it does not support a customised performance of identity. However, this IP-address function, which constructs a hypothetical connection between users’ place identity and temporary locality, exploits the locative turn of digital communication platforms. The display of news portal users’ locative information is contextualised in a society where the hukou system continues to stunt population mobility (Wong, Li, and Song 2007). This potentially encourages Chinese users to recognise each other based on an assumption that their place of origin corresponds to their current physical presence. This affective process may modulates these users’ self-categorisation, (re)shaping their discursive practice in the commentary system at various levels, depending on the scenario. In KhosraviNik’s terms, such a phenomenon precisely captures how meaning-making in mediated communication “becomes contingent to the horizontal level of the digital space as well as being vertically entrenched in the ‘real’ societal level” (Sarkhoh and Khosravinik 2020: 2).

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Approach and the case In the present research, data collection was based on a case study of an incident that prompted recent public attention to regional discrimination against Henan people amongst Chinese Internet users. This incident was the discovery of a village called Sunzhuang (located in Zhumadian City, Henan Province), where many residents were caught committing telecoms fraud crimes. I sampled ten news reports (six from Tencent; four from NetEase), which contain the complete collection of Tencent and NetEase’s coverage of the incident and local authorities’ investigation/ reactions published in February, June, and September of 2016, respectively. All user comments,2 under the ten news reports, were retrieved from the commentary system of Tencent (995 comments) and NetEase (6,797 comments). The sampled news reports captured a recent incident in which Henan criminal fraud suspects were involved. This incident is representative because Henan-based suspects were accused of being ‘dishonest’, relating to the longexisting, negative stereotype of people from the province. This characteristics of the incident render its news coverage eye-catching amongst Chinese users. It allows us to retrieve various types and huge numbers of comments underneath the sampled articles, providing us with swathes of data for analysis. An affective CDA approach was employed to analyse Chinese users’ discriminatory practice by scrutinising the intersection of user comments, sociocultural context, and the design of the news portal commentary system. In particular, the news reports retrieved from each news portal on the same dates show high levels of homogeny. Yet, NetEase’s commentary system incorporates a locative IP-address function, which does not exist on Tencent. A comparison between Tencent and NetEase users’ discursive practice reveals the extent to which the affectivity of locative information is manifested in users’ discursive practice.

Analysis and discussion I found that the user comments under the sampled news reports show relevance to the coverage of the incident; these comments reveal many Chinese users’ opinions on the fraud crime incident and its aftermath. However, while some users condemned the criminal conduct of individual criminal suspects, many others widened the target of their attack to the entire group of Henan people. In par2. The numbers of comments shown in both Tencent and NetEase’s commentary systems are higher than the actual numbers of comments collected. This is because some comments are filtered in line with official censorship.

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ticular, negative words/ phrases such as “Fraud” (Hits: Tencent – 253/NetEase – 1,307) and the “Headquarters [of Fraud Gangs]” (Hits: Tencent – 65/NetEase – 391) are frequently mentioned in comments. These negative words/ phrases are often deliberately used alongside those relating to Henan people (Hits: Tencent – 281/NetEase – 2,722). Such a collocation, to a large extent, describes Henan people as a homogenised group, whose members share the same dishonest characteristics, and are responsible for all the fraud-related crimes across the country (see Figures 1 and 2 for typical examples). This discursive practice reflects the biased evaluation of the characteristics of Henan people, as shared by many users of both news portals; this prejudice is in line with the long-existing, negative stereotype of this regional group permeating contemporary China.

Figure 1. Tencent user A-7: “Henan is the home of frauds notorious across the country. The headquarters [of these frauds] is in Zhumadian [Henan]” Retrieved from: http://coral.qq.com/1554259148

Figure 2. NetEase user A-1A: “[Henan is] one of the provinces that is notorious for frauds” Retrieved from: http://comment.news.163.com/3g_bbs/C1L9K7UP00963VRO.html

Contextualised by media discourses Media discourses represent a contextual pre-structure of the assemblage of users in the commentary system, which directs users’ attention to the evaluation of Henan people’s characteristics: I noted that the news reports retrieved from NetEase and Tencent showed a level of homogeny in their rhetoric: they employed the long-standing, negative stereotype to describe Henan people. “Referential strategies” are typically used for the stereotyping of a particular social group by the media (KhosraviNik 2014, 512). In this instance, the negative stereotyping of Henan people’s ‘dishonesty’ was realised by explicitly referring to the criminal fraud suspects as ‘of Henan origin’ in news titles and news stories. This

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referential strategy is notable in the present news coverage on the discovery of the fraud gangs. Title 1: The discovery of a Henan fraud village: villagers defraud by acting as soldiers; each household has saved more than 10 million Retrieved from: http://news.qq.com/a/20160926/007453.htm#p=1 (Tencent, 26 September 2016) Title 2: A Henan fraud village: villagers defraud by acting as soldiers; each household has saved more than 10 million Retrieved from: http://news.163.com/photoview/00AP0001/2200663 .html#p=C1SOIND800AP0001 (NetEase, 26 September 2016) As previously mentioned, Chinese news portals generally aggregate stories from the same information sources, such as national/ local newspapers and news agencies. This leads to their homogenised news coverage of the same incident. Yet, in the present case, the original reports sourced from traditional media detailed the criminal fraud suspects’ place of origin by naming the village from where they came. Interestingly, the editors of the Tencent news portal happened to concur with their peers at NetEase; “a Henan fraud village” was used to replace the name of the village in their re-edited versions. In both, ‘Henan’ is emphasised. The juxtaposition of ‘Henan’ and ‘Fraud’ proposes an association between local people and ‘organised fraud crime’, which exploits and feeds into the long-existing discriminatory discourses targeting Henan people. It, therefore, appears to the users that this incident is not an isolated case, but serves as a window to the ‘habitual dishonesty’ embedded in the characteristics of all residents living there. In contemporary China, inter-province population mobility/ migration has increased (Wong, Li, and Song 2007), but the historically and politically constructed divide between different regions has shaped place of origin into an important aspect of Chinese people’s collective identity (Zhang 2013). In the contemporary context, ‘being one of us’, to a certain extent, still refers to those who have been raised in the same region. With reference to this place identity, some non-Henan-based users may easily accept the negative stereotype of Henan origins because they do not consider a person from the province as ‘one of their own’. In the present incident, the deliberate referential strategies employed by the editors at both news portals indeed invoked this place-based self-identification of users; they discursively encouraged those non-Henan users, who had already accepted the negative stereotype of Henan people, to share their biased evaluation of the characteristics of people living in the province.

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Encouraged in peer-to-peer interactions Yet, this contextual pre-structure does not exercise complete control over users’ discursive practices. The interactive, non-linear dynamics of text production occurring in the commentary system provides users with the opportunity to challenge the orientation of media discourses as well. In particular, some of the comments of their peers, which reflect an indiscriminate accusation against all Henan people, can be offensive to those users who believe that their compatriots in Henan deserve fair treatment. While different users may hold very different views, one comment can snowball quickly, turning into a continuous and often heated debate amongst users. The cluster of user comments in Figure 3 was retrieved from Tencent. User A-10 initiated the dialogue by suggesting that ‘Henan frauds are most notorious’. This assertion was immediately rejected by user B-10, who struck back with a personal attack against user A-10. The arguments continued as user A-10 verbally assaulted B-10 and her/his family in return.

Figure 3. The arguments between Tencent users which involved the usage of swear words Retrieved from: http://coral.qq.com/1317949970

The difference between social media platforms, on which connections are primarily based on pre-existing intimacy (boyd 2014), and news portal commentary systems is that users are often known to each other prior to their encounters in a news portal commentary system. This anonymity determines that they are not completely bound by social norms (e.g., being polite to each other) to which people often adhere on intimate social occasions (boyd 2014). Under these circumstances, the debates between users can escalate aggressively, becoming an exchange of words due to one side’s use of abusive language (KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018). Certainly, it is important to mention that my data set shows that not all user comments involve swear words. There are users who pointed out that the characteristics of the whole Henan population cannot be based on the fact

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that there is a small number involved in isolated incidents (e.g., see Figure 4 – Tencent user C-7). However, these comments were often marginalised by a raft of comments involving highly abusive language use. The volume of comments of this kind provides a glimpse of the long-standing influence of biased media practice in contemporary China.

Figure 4. Tencent user C-7 ‘don’t judge the whole Henan population based on some of them (being involved in the fraud case)’ Retrieved from: http://coral.qq.com/1554259148

Locative IP-address function as a discursive reinforcer Following a similar pre-structured affective process, an exchange of swear words was observed amongst the sampled user comments circulating on both Tencent and NetEase. However, it emerged from the analysis that many of the comments by NetEase users involved the selection of words and phrases relating to regions outside Henan. Scrutinising the detailed use of these phrases, I noted a locative sensitivity in the debates relating to the characteristics of Henan people: as previously mentioned, the NetEase commentary system includes a unique IP-address function, which is not supported on Tencent (Qian 2011). This function allows each NetEase user to see the location from which their peers generate a comment. Figure 5 shows a representative scenario, in which users’ discursive practices are modulated by the locative nature of the IP-address function. According to the user locations verified by the IP-address function, two of the commenters were based in Henan, while the other three were from the more-developed eastern region (Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong). In this cluster of comments, opposing groups were formed between Henan commenters and their eastern region fellows, following an attack-and-counterattack pattern. The commentary cycle was initiated by the eastern side, with Guangdong user A-3 emphasising that Henan is the ‘keyword’ for this fraud crime news. Based

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Figure 5. Regional discriminatory arguments between NetEase users Retrieved from: http://comment.news.163.com/3g_bbs/C1L9K7UP00963VRO.html

on an incident involving Henan fraud gangs, such a discursive practice implies a connection between fraud and Henan people in general. The discursive orientation of this comment is implicit but intentional; it diverts the focus from the news incident to the negative stereotype of Henan origins, limiting the predictions and expectations from her/his fellow commenters. A-3’s comment receives an immediate rejection from Henan user B-3, who argues that Guangdong Province actually has the highest crime rate in the country. B-3’s claim is then dismissed by Shanghai user C-3, who calls for close scrutiny over the demographics of criminals, suggesting that most of the fraudsters captured in Guangdong were originally from Henan. Ironically, this call is exploited by user D-3, who appears to be from Henan, and who claims that it is Shanghai gangs who are roaming the country and committing crimes everywhere. The debates on the crime rate continue, as Beijing user E-3 joins the discussion. E-3 supports her/his eastern fellows’ claims by asserting that Henan people are notorious throughout the country, and that their dishonesty has been officially recognised by the police force. Such an assertion provokes Henan user D-3 to return to the ‘battle’. D-3 uses abusive language to repay the insult by describing people from Shanghai and Beijing (where C-3 and E-3 seem to be from) as ‘disgusting’ and ‘making people sick’. At this point, Henan and eastern region users

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are polarised into two camps. The interactions between the two camps follow a block-building pattern, with comments overlaid first within, and then across, groups. Abusive language is used in response to abusive language throughout the cycle. The arguments have, therefore, turned into an exchange of swear words, completely detached from the original debate. In the debates on the characteristics of Henan people, there is little doubt that opposing groups form as soon as the place identity of the participants is invoked. Clearly, the locative information, revealed by NetEase’s IP-address function, has encouraged these participants to pay attention to each other’s current location. This reveals that the attentive affect of locative information has opened up new capacities for users’ action by affecting how they recognise each other. In the above scenario, while users from the eastern region circulated a series of biased opinions on the characteristics of the entire Henan population, Henan users unified to counterattack in defence of their fellows living in the province. In particular, the rhetoric that these Henan users deployed was clearly influenced by their opponents’ locative information made available by the IP-address function. Rather than attacking individual characteristics, as is often found in Tencent’s commentary system, NetEase users tend to generate biased comments against the whole population of the province(s) where their opponents seem to be from. This is affectively modulated by the way in which their opponents’ place identity is visually represented. The IP-address function automatically locates their position by recognising the IP address of the devices on which they access the Internet. Therefore, the current location of the user is revealed as soon as they generate a comment. Although this IP-address function merely displays the place where a NetEase user’s body is temporarily situated, the connotation of this locative information, as a symbolic sign, is contextualised within a society in which people’s place identity has become economically and socio-politically prominent. Once displayed as the most notable digital sign of a user’s presence in the commentary system, the attentive affectivity of the locative information is activated. This affectivity encourages users to recognise each other through their temporary yet verified engagement with a place. It provokes users to form regionally organised camps to resist the prejudice against the social communities to which they belong, potentially modulating the way in which regional discriminatory discourses are practised in the commentary system. However, the user location detected by NetEase’s IP-address function may not always accurately reflect the place identity of each user. I noted that there were instances where users appeared to be from Henan but claimed to be from other regions and circulated biased comments against Henan people, and vice versa. The confusion in these instances is most likely caused by the increased

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inter-province mobility/ migration in contemporary China. However, my analysis showcases the particular attention to each other’s locative information that NetEase users pay, whether or not this temporary physical presence at a place accurately reflects their identity. The locative sensitivity of NetEase users’ discursive practice is manifest, resulting in intense discriminatory practice against Henan people, and collateral damage to their compatriots from the eastern region and beyond. This locative sensitivity has, to a certain extent, widened the divide between compatriots coming from different provinces with different perspectives. It sharply escalates each group’s discriminatory practice against the other in the context of a news portal’s commentary system. In addition, it provides a window on the amplification of regional discriminatory discourses in relation to the presence/ absence of an IP-address function in the commentary system of a Chinese news portal.

Conclusion: The digital affective-discursive loop and regional discriminatory discourses In this chapter, I have articulated the affective modulation of digital communication users’ discursive practices by using Chinese users’ practice of regional discriminatory discourses on Chinese news portals as an example. My affective CDA study shows that the amplification of regional discriminatory discourses against Henan people is inseparable from the inclusion of locative services in the user commentary systems of news portals. Nowadays, the Internet has extended to identifying the physical locations of users (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2012). By integrating the geolocation of a personal computer, or the GPS coordinates of a smartphone, the emergence of locative services prompts an increasingly dynamic interplay between users’ physical location and their use of digital communication technologies across the world (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2012). This interplay challenges the assumption of the Internet being a virtual space, inspiring exploration of how locative services reshape users’ experience of urban space, selfrepresentation, and social interaction with strangers on social media platforms that incorporate locative features (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2012). Feeding into this genre of scholarship, my study has uncovered the ways in which the locative design of digital communication platforms affects Internet users’ discursive practices, by addressing the role the IP-address function plays in the amplification of regional discriminatory discourses occurring in the commentary system of news portals. The existing literature on regional discrimination focuses on media discourse following a traditional CDA research paradigm; this approach has its merits but

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often overlooks how the technological architecture modulates users’ discursive practices. In particular, digital communication platforms are not an “ideological machine in a traditional sense” (KhosraviNik 2018, 429). By allowing users to generate their own original content, these platforms are largely automatically controlled by algorithms so that human factors do not directly influence regimentation (KhosraviNik 2018). Thus, my present study employs an affective lens to reveal the amplification of regional discriminatory discourses on news portals in relation to the affective modulation of users’ discursive practices caused by the locative design of digital communication platforms. My findings speak to a large body of the literature on affect studies (KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018; KhosraviNik 2022; Wetherell 2012; Kelsey 2015), facilitating an understanding of the affective-discursive loop embedded in digital users’ practices of ideology and identity. It should be noted that the affective modulation of users’ discursive practices is not independent of sociopolitical contexts. In the present case, while blocking ordinary users’ access to popular Western websites, the Chinese authorities creates] a unique business ecology wherein giant native Internet companies monopolise the market (Fuchs 2016). Yet, these Chinese Internet companies must cooperate with the government in order to survive. In particular, public discussions of state politics are often considered sensitive by the Chinese government; cyber-police units are deployed to censor content and gather intelligence about dissidents on digital communication platforms (Rod and Weidmann 2015). The commentary systems of Chinese news portals are subject to this surveillance. For instance, NetEase (2016, 21) admitted that user-generated content circulating on its website is required to undergo the government’s “computer security inspections”. However, the main purpose of the government’s Internet censorship is to prevent collective protests against the party-state (King, Pan, and Roberts 2013). Native Internet companies are allowed a high level of freedom to compete in the market to boost economic development (Fuchs 2016). The operation of these Internet companies is profit-driven, showing a resemblance to their counterparts in the West (Fuchs 2016). While regional discrimination is not targeted by the government’s censorship, these companies are given autonomy to design and operate their news portal businesses with little concern over any collateral consequences. Without follow-up interviews of NetEase’s managers or web designers, I cannot determine whether the amplification of regional discriminatory discourses is strategically exploited by the company to compete with other news portals for user attention – the scarcest resource for digital businesses nowadays (Goldhaber 2006). However, facing increasingly intensive market competition, NetEase has also not demonstrated any intention to avoid the collateral consequences of the

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locative design of NetEase’s commentary system. In this sense, the company is, to a certain extent, responsible for the escalation of regional discrimination amongst Chinese Internet users, whether they are conscious of it or not. The present research is based on a case study of regional discrimination against Henan people conducted in 2016, and as such it does not fully account for the most recent social media landscape of China in the wake of the rise of platforms such as WeChat and TikTok. Meanwhile, the focus of the research is on the locative IP-address function’s amplification of users’ discriminatory practice on Chinese news portals, meaning that my findings have to be understood in relation to a unique technological aspect of regional discrimination occurring on digital communication platforms, rather than as a grand narrative, with all the sociocultural complexities of this phenomenon. However, these findings should inspire further research to examine the impacts of technological architecture on other forms of discrimination, such as sexism, racism, and ageism, in China and beyond. On the methodological dimension, this chapter also makes contributions in response to CDS notions of discursive power in the digital realm by shedding light on the affective-discursive loop fixed in digital communication users’ discursive practices. Following KhosraviNik’s (2018) advocacy of a turn to affect in SM-CDS, my research develops an affective CDA approach to examine the interplay between users’ discursive practices and the design of a digital communication platform on which the discursive practices are facilitated and modulated. This approach challenges the traditional CDS research paradigm, which features sociocultural determinism. It provides a balanced account of technological and sociocultural factors in the shaping of discourses, thus helping us to recognise the dynamic intersection of affect theory and CDS in contemporary society in which technological modulation of discursive practices is prevalent.

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Social media soft affective politics through discursive and algorithmic synchronization Evidence from a Kuwaiti YouTube video Francesco L. Sinatora

The George Washington University

This chapter explores the link between language, social media, and affective politics through the case study of a YouTube commercial by the Kuwaiti telecommunication company Zain. The video, which exhorts Muslims to reject Islamic terrorism and embrace a moderate version of Islam through a hybrid, emotional mixture of language, music, and images of victims of terrorism, generated a large response among Arab and international audiences, who aligned with its progressive message. Drawing on the notion of “synchronization” (Al Zidjaly 2012; Blommaert 2005), I argue that the commercial constitutes an example of soft affective politics, which reinforces dominant discourses about radical, ‘moderate’ Islam, and about the conflicts in the Arab world by capitalizing on the indexicality of multimodal communication and on the ranking algorithm of the YouTube comments section. I suggest the term algorithmic synchronization to explain the way in which, by displaying more recent and more popular comments on top, the YouTube algorithm erases the historical complexity surrounding discourses of religion, terrorism, and conflict in the Middle East. The study shows how the algorithms of the comments section yield more visibility to the comments aligning with the commercial, thus creating a discursive interpretive nudge and manipulating the discursive power of the representation. The analysis of algorithmic synchronization underlying soft affective discourse is in line with proposals around the need for “TechnoDiscursive” approaches which situate a “micro” analysis of linguistic dynamics within the “macro” power-discursive environment (KhosraviNik 2017b, 2018).

1.

Introduction

In recent years, social media have played a central role in the shaping of language, discourse, and identity in the Arab and Middle Eastern sociopolitical context https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.100.04sin © 2023 John Benjamins Publishing Company

Social media soft affective politics through discursive and algorithmic synchronization

(e.g., Al Zidjaly 2017; KhosraviNik and Sarkhoh 2017; Sinatora 2019). Despite their potentiality for democratic advancement, they have increasingly become a site for the diffusion of populist ideas through “affective communication,” rather than a space for political deliberation through argumentation (KhosraviNik 2017a). Their affective political function, as argued by KhosraviNik (2018), is to be analyzed in light of the intersection between the business-oriented algorithmic systems regulating social media participation and the “hyper-normalization” of neoliberal values, such as the “extreme individualism, competitive (rather than deliberative) persuasion and foregrounding of relatability over rationality” (428). In this chapter, I explore the link between language, social media, and affective politics through the example of a commercial uploaded to YouTube by the Kuwaiti telecommunication company Zain in 2017. In recent years, Zain, whose main shareholder is a sovereign wealth fund of the Kuwaiti state, has been known for producing advertisements during the month of Ramadan which foreground contemporary political matters. The 2017 commercial exhorts Muslims to embrace a moderate Islamic identity and to reject terrorism. The message is conveyed through ‘soft’ and ‘progressive’ tones, characterized by a hybrid linguistic and multimodal mixture of Quranic language, music, and images. I analyze the type of hybridity displayed in the commercial and the contrasting reactions toward it by drawing on the notion of “synchronization” – namely, a powerful linguistic and discursive strategy that presents one historical perspective as a universal truth while concealing the complex and multi-faceted dimension of social phenomena (Blommaert 2005). Synchronization may also occur multimodally, which can transform the way that social issues are presented and perceived (Al Zidjaly 2012). Similarly, in this chapter, I will show how, through linguistic hybridity and multimodality, the Zain commercial depoliticized Islamic terrorism synchronically, decontextualizing it from the historical complexity in which it is embedded. Synchronization is achieved by linking terrorism to one particular historical dimension, namely, the 2015–17 international “war on ISIS,” characterized by a narrative which considers Islamic terrorism as the primary cause of the conflicts in the Middle East. Interestingly, this narrative is consistent with that of the Syrian government, which posited that the 2011 civil uprising had been fomented by Islamic extremists. I will discuss how this commercial uses the image of a Syrian child who was allegedly injured in a Russian airstrike, presenting him as a victim of Islamic terrorism, leading to a backlash by a group of Syrian dissidents, who argued that Zain “distorted the truth” about the Syrian conflict. This transcending narrative also echoes a dominant Western populist discourse, according to which Muslims have not yet done enough to reject terrorism. Central to this process of synchronization is the “entextualization” (Androutsopoulos 2014; Bauman and Briggs 1990; Leppänen et al. 2014) of lan-

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guage, music, and images. I further expand the linguistic, multimodal, and discursive notion of synchronization within a social-media communication paradigm that analyzes “micro” linguistic dynamics horizontally and vertically vis-à-vis a “macro,” “techno-discursive” perspective (KhosraviNik 2017b, 2018, 2020), in order to explore the impact of YouTube-enabled processes of consumption, circulation, visibility, and (re)production on broader social discourses. To this end, I suggest the term algorithmic synchronization to emphasize the impact of YouTube’s video recommendation algorithm (see Covington et al. 2016; Valentino Bryant 2020) and comment sorting system on the discursive simplification of complex sociopolitical phenomena. YouTube’s comment sorting system incentivizes positive engagement with the commercial’s messaging by boosting more recent and positive comments to the top of the comments section. The comments section of the Zain video repopulates every Ramadan with positive reactions. These comments enhance the visibility and searchability of the video, which distinctly marginalizes the 2017 oppositional reactions from Syrian dissidents. I argue that the commercial and the comments constitute a particular case of soft “affective communication” – namely, a strategy of soft political power that plays on social media “techno-discursive” (KhosraviNik 2018) dynamics in order to instigate top-down sociopolitical change. This type of soft affective politics is grounded in the role of social media as tools in which “soft” online practices have an impact on larger-scale sociopolitical phenomena (Du 2016, as cited in Blommaert 2018). From the ensuing linguistic and historical analysis, it will emerge that the type of discursive and algorithmic synchronization enhanced by the YouTube commercial precludes the possibility for an argumentative discussion to take shape. In the following sections, I first reconstruct the historical complexity surrounding this communicative event, including the Syrian conflict. I then proceed to analyze how such historical complexity is synchronized through linguistic and multimodal hybridity. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of the “techno-discursive” (KhosraviNik 2018) dynamics of linguistic and algorithmic synchronization in relation to broader societal discourses.

2.

Sociohistorical profile

On the wave of the sociopolitical mobilization known as the Arab Spring, Syrian protestors took to the streets in 2011 to demand freedom and dignity first, and the fall of president Bashar al-Asad’s regime later. The reasons that led to this uprising pertain to the complex sociohistorical and political framework of Syria, an understanding of which is necessary to grasp the historical dimension in which the Zain and the Syrian dissidents’ perspectives are embedded. Syria is a former

Social media soft affective politics through discursive and algorithmic synchronization

province of the Ottoman Empire, which, after the First World War, was governed by the French mandate until independence in 1946. The year 1946 also coincided with the establishment of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni group that obtained seats in parliament in the 1949 and 1962 elections and which opposed coercive military secularization (Pierret 2014). In the 1960s, the Ba’ath party, led by non-Sunni Muslims driven by a secularist agenda, came to power with a “revolution from above” (Hinnebusch 2001), replacing a class of urban Sunni bourgeoisie. The consolidation of the Ba’ath is connected with the rise to power of the Alawites (Hinnebusch 2016), a non-Sunni Islamic sect which constituted an erstwhile socioeconomically disadvantaged group from the rural coastal region of Syria (Salamandra 2004) and whose members filled the ranks of the army under the French mandate (Hinnebusch 2001). After Alawite Hafiz al-Asad seized power in 1970, the Muslim Brotherhood was subject to both violent repression and the exclusion of Sunni scholars from administrating religious affairs (Pierret 2014). The complicated relations between the government and Sunni scholars, some of whom maintained allegiance to the government, deteriorated during Bashar alAsad’s tenure due to the attempt by the government to further secularize school curricula and the increased perception of growing Shiite proselytism in the country (ibid.). Sectarian tensions intensified throughout the Syrian conflict. After the dissolution of the Free Syrian Army, Islamist groups affiliated with Al-Qaeda and funded by Sunni (primarily Salafi) private donors in the Gulf countries, including Kuwait, and ISIS, continued the armed struggle against Bashar al-Asad’s government on Syrian turf (Dickinson 2013, as cited in Baxter 2016). The Kuwaiti involvement with the Syrian conflict is entangled with its own domestic sociopolitical dynamics. Kuwait is governed by a Sunni royal family and a Sunni-majority parliament, which includes a number of Salafi representatives, as well as an active Shia minority. The Gulf monarchy condemned the Syrian regime in 2011, a move that should be seen in light of Syria’s pro-Iranian agenda and Bashar al-Asad’s violent repression. In 2012, Kuwait officially backed the Syrian rebels and, despite enacting legislative and diplomatic measures to prevent the funding of terrorist groups, these measures were not adequately enforced, which jeopardized the credibility of the government (Baxter 2016; Dickinson 2013, as cited in Baxter 2016). The 2015 ISIS attack on a Shia mosque in Kuwait City led the government to take more drastic and controversial steps to ensure security as part of a “rhetoric of ‘fighting terror’” (Baxter 2016: 140). In sum, the Zain commercial needs to be understood against the backdrop of the controversial 2011–15 involvement of Kuwait in the Syrian conflict: its simultaneous indirect support for terrorist funding and the fight against Islamic terrorism amid global anti-ISIS discourse, as well as its attempt to safeguard its international reputation and appease its

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Shia population after the 2015 attack. In the analysis below, I demonstrate how the political rhetoric of “fighting terror” is linguistically and discursively sustained through the example of a commercial produced by the Kuwaiti telecommunication company Zain and uploaded to the company’s YouTube channel in 2017. I will argue that this commercial constitutes a top-down political tool powered by algorithmically enhanced, bottom-up, social media affordances.

3.

Multimodality, hybridity, and discursive synchronization

The discursive power of the Zain commercial derives from the multimodal intersection of language, images, and music. In addition to spoken dialects, Arabic is characterized by the presence of formal and predominantly written varieties, including Modern Standard Arabic, Classical Arabic, and Quranic Arabic. Although these varieties – broadly classified in Arabic as fuṣḥā – emerged in different historical phases, they all exert “symbolic power” (Bourdieu 1991) by virtue of their link to the domains of religion, literature, and politics (Høigilt and Mejdell 2017). Fuṣḥā is indexically associated with “the realm of the divine, authority and legitimacy,” as well as with male speech, religion, rurality, and education (Bassiouney 2014: 145). The degree of formality varies in large measure according to the presence of inflection, marked in oral and written form through vocalization (Brustad 2017). Whereas full vocalization is heard in news bulletin broadcasts, poetry, and Quran recitation, one sees it written in very few authoritative texts, such as the Quran, school textbooks, and some literary works. Citing Parkinson (1993), Brustad (2017) explains that inflection plays a central role in the way Arabic speakers ideologically perceive linguistic varieties as distinct. In Sinatora (2019, 2020), I proposed analyzing the social media practices of Syrian dissidents through hybridity, namely, “a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance” (Bakhtin 1981: 358). Hybridity became a focus in the study of bilingual contexts to emphasize the unbounded nature of linguistic varieties, as well as their simultaneous deployment in the construction of social identities (cf. Hall and Nilep 2015), and it was operationalized in the Arabic context as the bivalency of fuṣḥā and spoken vernaculars (Mejdell 2012; Somekh 1991). Hybridity has gained renewed attention in order to account for the mixing of the local and global features underlying identity and discourse in global and digital contexts (Al Zidjaly 2019; Androutsopoulos 2011; Rubdy and Alsagoff 2014), and the performative insertion of linguistic segments and their implications in terms of power have been analyzed through the notion of “entextualization” (Androutsopoulos 2014; Bauman and Briggs 1990; Leppänen et al. 2014). In the Zain commercial, linguistic mixing is pervasive. The full vocalization of the fuṣḥā

Social media soft affective politics through discursive and algorithmic synchronization

oral texts and partial vocalization of written captions constitute a strategy through which the producers point at the indexical meanings of fuṣḥā in order to promote their political message. The Arabic captions are accompanied by English captions, which adds to the hybrid character of the commercial. In addition to linguistic hybridity, the commercial is characterized by multimodal complexity deriving from a mixture of language (written and spoken), images, and music. The indexicality of linguistic hybridity and multimodality underlies what Blommaert (2005) defines as “layered simultaneity” in discourse. The peculiar historical perspective from and through which individuals access this indexicality accounts for the power of synchronization in discourse (Blommaert 2005, 2015). Synchronization, Blommaert argues, results in dynamics of “continuity” and “discontinuity.” The former is achieved when the speakers involved in a communicative event – such as the Zain producers, the Kuwaiti government, and the appreciative YouTube audience – view it through a similar historical lens. The latter occurs when speakers “orienting toward” different historical backgrounds are involved (Blommaert 2005). Continuity and discontinuity, according to Blommaert, are indexically engendered and sustained. I will show how Arab and international YouTube audiences are enticed by the deployment of linguistic and multimodal indexical meanings, such as the use of Quranic Arabic features to index authority (Bassiouney 2014), as well as by the inclusion of pop icons, such as Hussein al-Jasmi, and victims of terrorism. Al Zidjaly (2012) demonstrates how synchronization can also be achieved multimodally to “unintentionally harm social causes” (190). I will show how, through each mode, the Zain commercial synchronically triggers an emotional response from different audiences around terrorism and conflict, which are presented as cultural, rather than complex political phenomena. The notion of synchronization is connected with that of “chronotopes,” defined by Blommaert (2015: 111) as “chunks of history” through which individuals position themselves in discourse. I will argue that the Syrian dissidents’ repoliticization of the message is enabled by their repositioning towards the chronotope of the Syrian uprising, which allowed them to view and evaluate the commercial’s content through a broader historical lens.

4.

Zain

The telecommunication company Zain is a public shareholding founded in Kuwait in 1983 and present in 15 African and seven Middle Eastern countries.1 The largest shareholder is the Kuwaiti sovereign wealth fund known as the Kuwait 1. https://www.zain.com/en/about-us/overview/.

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Investment Authority.2 One of the functions of sovereign wealth funds, namely state-controlled investment tools, is to pursue domestic and foreign political agendas (Kamiński 2017). Paraphrasing Hatton and Pistor (2012), Kamiński points out that “in political entities without electoral democracy, such as China, Singapore, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi, the overriding objective of SWFs is to maximise the objectives of politicians”; as such, “the true stakeholders in SWFs are the ruling elites in the sovereign sponsor …[so] it is [in] the interest of these elites that SWFs advance” (2017: 30–31). Political messages are prominent in the commercials produced by Zain in recent years for the Islamic holiday of Ramadan. The 2017 commercial revolves around a confrontation between a radical Islamic terrorist and a group of Arab and Muslim civilians, set first in a bombed bus and later in the streets of a stereotypically depicted Arab city. Some of these civilians impersonate actual victims of terrorist attacks, including the victims of the 2015 ISIS attack on a Shia Mosque in Kuwait City; Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani activist attacked by the Taliban; and the Syrian child Omran Daqneesh, whose depiction as a victim of radical Islamic terrorism caused much social media backlash, as explained in more detail below. Through the 2017 commercial, Zain exhorted Arabs and Muslims to reject radical Islamic terrorism and embrace a ‘moderate’ Islamic identity. In order to fully understand this message, it is necessary to consider the wider sociopolitical context. In 2017, the US announced that toppling Asad was no longer a priority, and that all efforts should be directed towards the defeat of ISIS.3 In addition, after the 2015 ISIS attack on a Shia mosque, the Kuwaiti government intensified its antiterrorist security measures. In light of this historical background, one may assume that the political goal pursued by the Kuwait Investment Authority through this commercial is to whitewash Kuwait’s reputation as a sponsor of international terrorism, and to maintain a domestic balance with the Shia community by not directly addressing Bashar alAsad’s responsibility in the Syrian crisis. Although the Kuwaiti government is not the only company shareholder, and the commercial’s producers may be guided by progressive intents not necessarily aligned with the Kuwaiti government’s political direction, the above-delineated current historical dimension is useful to desynchronize the message conveyed by the video. Synchronization, as I will show below, is achieved through a soft emotional language, by means of which the political message is presented as universal sociocultural advancement. Whereas recent 2. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-zain-factbox/facts-about-gulf-mobile-operator-zain-id USTRE61C15K20100213. 3. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-usa-haley/u-s-priority-on-syria-no -longer-focused-on-getting-assad-out-haley-idUSKBN1712QL.

Social media soft affective politics through discursive and algorithmic synchronization

literature has emphasized the connection between affective politics, technology, and market dynamics in the West (cf. KhosraviNik 2018), I suggest through my analysis that synchronization through hybridity is a productive tool of a particular type of affective politics, conveyed through soft and progressive tones. Synchronization is amplified digitally through the exploitation of YouTube algorithms.

5.

The 2017 Zain commercial

The three-minute and eleven-second long Ramadan commercial analyzed here was published on the telecommunication company Zain’s YouTube channel on 26 May 2017. As of 16 September 2019, it had received 176k likes (in YouTube jargon “thumbs up”) and 18k dislikes, as well as 15,669 comments. The ad is designed (Kress and Van Leeuween 2006) in such a way that the message intended by the producers – namely, the promotion of a moderate Islamic identity as opposed to radical Islamic terrorism – is conveyed through sequences of overlapping modes. Dark and bright images overlap with oral texts, which in turn are represented through music as well as written captions in Arabic and English.

Figure 1. Zain commercial’s multimodal design

These overlapping modes engage in a constant internal dialogue (Bakhtin 1981) with each other. In order to illustrate this, I will analyze the commercial sequence by sequence. Throughout the analysis, I report the original English subtitles as they appear in the video. The bolded letters correspond to the short vowels marked in the Arabic captions.

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First sequence Language (child’s voice) 1 sa-’uḫbiru -ḷḷāh bi-kulli šay’, I will tell God everything 2 bi-’annakum mal’ātum al-maqābir bi-’aṭfālinā wa-karāsi l-madāris fāriġa That you’ve filled the cemeteries with our children and emptied our school desks

Images

Music

Montage alternating dark sepia images of a terrorist plotting an attack and colorful images of intimate domestic moments (children playing, children in a classroom, a grandfather holding his grandchild, a bride and groom) and the Zain logo

Mellow tune

3 wa-’aš‘altum al-fitan wa-nasaytum maṣābīḥ šawār‘ina muṭfā’a That you’ve sparked unrest and turned our streets to darkness 4 ’annakum kaḏabtum, wa-ḷḷāhu ’a‘lam bi-ḏāt iṣ-ṣudūr And that you’ve lied. God has full knowledge of the secrets of all hearts

The child uses full vocalization in his narration. However, only some short vowels (bolded in the gloss) are present in the Arabic captions, particularly in the first sentence uttered by the child. Full oral and partially written vocalization help to “key” the child’s linguistic performance (Brustad 2017) with reference to religious discourse, legitimizing his narration by virtue of the indexical relationship between short vowels and the aforementioned authoritative texts. In addition to the use of full vocalization, the boy assumes an authoritative stance (Bassiouney 2017) through the use of the pronouns we and you-pl, thus demarcating a distinction between the young and innocent victims of terrorism versus their persecutors. This distinction is further emphasised by the alternation of sepia tones, indexing the misery caused by terrorism, with bright colours, indexing hope and progress. The lexical choices are also worth noting. The child’s intention to inform aḷḷāh (“God”) and the word fitan frame the utterance in religious discourse. Fitan, the plural of fitna (“sedition”), is a Quranic term which refers to the discord that arose in the Muslim community after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. This word is also charged in Syrian political discourse, as it has been used by the government as a bugbear to control dissent. It was used by Bashar al-Asad at the beginning of the 2011 uprising to suggest that the protests had been seditiously incited by (Sunni) radical Islamic groups.

Social media soft affective politics through discursive and algorithmic synchronization

Second sequence In the second sequence, the terrorist leaves the basement and walks onto a bombed bus full of injured men, women, and children. During this scene, almost entirely dominated by sepia tones, the terrorist addresses the passengers with Islamic expressions, uttered in a way that evokes Quranic recitation. In their replies, two passengers, an old man and a child, reconfigure these expressions accompanied by instrumental music. This scene is followed by an exchange between the terrorist and a young boy. The child, meant to portray Omran Daqneesh, holds an issue of a Western magazine resembling the Time magazine cover featuring the photo of the Syrian boy. Omran was presented by Western media as a symbol of the suffering and resilience of the Syrian population. The inclusion of this image in the commercial triggered a backlash from Syrian anti-Asad activists, who pointed out that Omran had not been injured by radical Islamic terrorists, but by an airstrike of the Syrian government and its Russian ally. Language 5 Terrorist: ’ašhadu ’an lā ’ilāha ’illā -ḷḷāh I bear witness that there is no God but Allah

Images

Music

Terrorist walks onto bus

No music

6 Old man: yā qādiman li-l-mawt huwa ḫāliqu l-ḥayāt You who comes in the name of death, He is the creator of life

Instrumental music

7 Terrorist: ’ašhadu ’anna muḥammadan ‘abduhu warasūlu -ḷḷāh I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God

No music

8 Young boy: musāmihu l-ḥalīm lam yu’ḏḏi man ’aḏāh The forgiving and forbearing that hurts not who hurts Him

Young boy portrayed as Omran Daqneesh

Instrumental music

The terrorist’s Islamic invocations are reconfigured by the old man and the boy through expressions which are not direct scriptural quotations, like the ones recited by the terrorist, but are nevertheless legitimized through full vocalization, only marked graphically in words directly referring to God, such as huwa (‘He’), ḫāliqu l-ḥayāt (‘the creator of life’), musāmihu l-ḥalīm (‘the forgiving and forbearing’). The terms ḫāliqu l-ḥayāt and musāmihu l-ḥalīm are compounds obtained

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through the juxtaposition of one the 99 names for God (al-ḫāliq, ‘the Creator’; al-ḥalīm, ‘the Most Forbearing’) with the words l-ḥayāt and musāmihu. This juxtaposition symbolically represents a reconfiguration and re-appropriation of Quranic discourse that is connected to the message of religious modernization underlying the commercial. The use of instrumental music accompanying lines (6) and (8) is highly symbolic. Instrumental music is prohibited according to some radical interpretations of Islam. According to this view, its use in a religiously framed discourse is tantamount to promoting a progressive version of religion.

Third sequence The melodious and melancholic tone of the child’s and the old man’s performance in the previous sequence suddenly gives way to a more pressing rhythm. The third sequence features a confrontation between the terrorist and various victims of terrorism – the groom from the first sequence now injured in an attack, the Malala Yousafzai avatar surrounded by children in a bombed school, and a man escaping from the 2015 ISIS attack on the Shiite Kuwaiti al-’Imām aṣ-Ṣādiq Mosque. In verses 9–13 (omitted here for brevity), the terrorist repeats the expression aḷḷāhu ’akbar (“God is greatest”) three times. In the West, this Islamic expression has acquired a negative connotation in connection with Islamic terrorism. Each time, this expression is reconfigured by the three victims. The victims respond to the terrorist’s aḷḷāhu ’akbar through almost fully vocalized utterances in which they reappropriate the Islamic expression, thereby rejecting its radical interpretation.

Fourth sequence The fourth sequence opens with an image of famous Emirati pop singer Hussein al-Jasmi performing against a sunny, bright blue sky, wearing a traditional dišdāša that helps mark him as an authentic representative of Islamic culture. His image alternates with that of Muslim victims of terrorist attacks. Hussein al-Jasmi’s appearance occurs exactly in the middle of the commercial, which further emphasizes the symbolism between his performance and the ad’s political message. By repeating the expression aḷḷāhu ’akbar accompanied by instrumental music, the singer re-appropriates the symbolism attributed to this Islamic term by radical groups, and uses it as an expression of imploration and anguish. Unlike the melancholic musical rhythm in the previous sequences, the declaimed tone of Hussein al-Jasmi’s performance increases the pathos of the images displayed. His use of aḷḷāhu ’akbar to express dismay towards the destruction provoked by

Social media soft affective politics through discursive and algorithmic synchronization

radical Islamic attacks, and the instrumental music accompanying this Quranic expression, further reinforce the ad’s promotion of a moderate Islamic identity.

Fifth sequence The solemn and topical moment of Hussein al-Jasmi’s performance in the fourth sequence is suddenly interrupted by a decrescendo and change of scene which features a tense confrontation between the terrorist and a group of civilians. The frantic run of the terrorist is contrasted by the peaceful forward march of the crowd surrounding him. This change of scene lays the affective groundwork for Hussein al-Jasmi’s jubilant tune, which symbolizes the reappropriation of Islamic discourse as the key to a peaceful future. Hussein al-Jasmi’s song 14 ’a‘budu rabbaka ḥubban lā ru‘ban Worship your God with love, not terror 15 kun fī dīnika sahlan lā ṣa‘ban Be tender in your faith, tender not harsh

Images First image: Smiling singer walks toward the frightened terrorist at a steady pace, causing the terrorist to fall. Second image: A smiling young girl wipes blood off the Omran Daqneesh lookalike’s face.

16 ḫālif niddika silman lā ḥarban Confront your enemy, with peace not war

The singer stretches out his arm towards the terrorist to help him get up again. The Zain logo materialises out of their handshake.

17 ’iqna‘ ġayraka līnan lā ġaṣban Persuade others, with leniency not by force

First image: The singer points his finger and turns his face to the left, gazing outside the screen, as if to indicate the following image. Second image: On the right side, a man in Islamic religious clothing talks to a young man in Western clothing on the left. Hanging on the wall next to them is the framed Quranic verse lā ’ikrāha fī d-dīni (“Let there be no compulsion in religion”).

In verses 14–17, the images accentuate the meaning of the song’s lyrics, symbolizing a moderate approach to Islam through gestures of reconciliation. This approach is legitimized in the last image through the visual entextualization of a Quranic verse, which is often used in public discourse to make the argument that Islam is a religion of tolerance. The authoritative force of this verse is emphasized by the fully vocalized calligraphy.

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Song lines 14–17 are repeated again, highlighting the centrality of their message, and accompanied by images of youths raising peaceful protest signs against terrorism. The inclusion of these protest signs is worth noting as it evokes another music video by Hussein al-Jasmi, the 2014 one calling Egyptians to vote in the elections which led al-Sisi and his secular military government to victory (see Gameel and El Ghetany 2019). Additionally, they symbolically evoke the protest signs that dominated the Arab Spring. Instead of inciting the fall of regimes, these signs incite the fall of religious extremism. This sequence ends with a sudden interruption of the joyful music, and a tense image of the terrorist kneeling down to detonate the bomb.

Sixth sequence The sixth and final sequence begins with fireworks, replacing the actual bomb detonation and evoking the holiday of Ramadan. This image is followed by cheerful shots of the wedding couple and their guests, as well as that of a bride who survived a terrorist attack at her wedding in Amman. Hussein al-Jasmi’s song resumes with verses that exhort social change away from religious extremism, such as the last verse, li-nufağğir at-ta‘aṣṣuba narqā (“Let’s bomb extremism for a better life”). Throughout the commercial, the music changes from melancholic and mellow, symbolizing the misery and destruction associated with terrorism, to a heartening climactic crescendo that expresses anguish, to a rapturous tune at the end. The dominant maqām is kurd, which is one of the most commonly found scales in contemporary Arab pop music.4 Popular music has been identified as a central resource in multimodal political discourse (Ghaffari 2019; Way 2017). Gameel and El Ghetany (2019) show that pop songs have been increasingly used in public discourse in Egypt, especially since 2011, with a predominantly political function. Hussein al-Jasmi’s use of the kurd scale is particularly noteworthy in light of the political message of the commercial. This scale lacks the quarter tones quintessentially associated with traditional Arab music. Although it is a traditional maqām, it is simultaneously perceived as more ‘modern’ because of the absence of the quarter tones, and by virtue of its association with contemporary Arab pop music. The choice of this maqām makes the sound more accessible to an international audience, thus contributing to the numerous reactions in the comments section.

4. I thank Najma Al Zidjaly for directing my attention to the social meaning of music in the commercial and to Maher Alshafi for pointing out the predominance of this maqām and its connection with contemporary Arab pop music.

Social media soft affective politics through discursive and algorithmic synchronization

6.

Audience reaction, visibility, and synchronization

Synchronization, Blommaert (2005) emphasizes, is a “tactic of power” which manifests itself “in images of continuity, logical outcomes and textual coherence. It is a denial of the complexity of the particular position from which one speaks, and of the differences between that position and that of others” (136). The authoritativeness of this synchronic perspective derives from the deployment of specific indexical resources linked with the “synchronic […] here-and-now” – namely, a chronotopic dimension populated by current dominant discourses (Blommaert 2005: 141). In my analysis, I identified these resources as the use of Quranic Arabic, that of pop music, as well as that of iconic images of victims of terrorism. I traced the ways in which these resources are reconfigured, or entextualized, and reappropriated to sustain a dominant discourse of cultural change, from religious extremism to modernism. The effectiveness of the dynamics of “continuity” underlying the synchronization of terrorism as a cultural phenomenon is evident in the overwhelmingly emotional YouTube comment reactions. Since the commercial was uploaded to YouTube in May 2017, the video has received thousands of comments. Most comments are in Arabic, composed in bivalent (Mejdell 2012) forms, as well as Levantine and Gulf dialects. These commenters display an emotional stance towards the video, often emphasized through the use of emojis. They are moved by the choice of music, the images of terrorist attacks which targeted the Arab world, or they simply express joyful Ramadan-season sentiments, motivated by the fact that in past years Zain has produced similar socially committed commercials in concomitance with this Islamic holiday. Several comments are composed in European languages. The authors of these comments are non-Arabs who identify themselves overtly through their national and/or religious affiliations as German, Spanish, Italian, Korean, Christian, atheist, “not really religious,” etc. (see Figure 2). All these comments are appreciative of the progressive religious message.

Figure 2. International comment praising Zain 2017 commercial

Some of these commenters explicitly explain what drew them to this commercial. A Pakistani commenter, for example, suggested that they were moved by the

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image of the young female activist Malala. The use of such globally iconic figures contributed to the inclusion of an international audience. A few comments disaligned with the commercial. One criticized the use of instrumental music to accompany the religious discourse in it. According to some radical approaches to Islam, in fact, the use of instrumental music is prohibited. Despite the oppositional orientation, one could say that this commenter also perceived the message in continuity with the commercial, in that his criticism revolves around the dominant discourse of cultural change. Some other comments, which were more visible in 2018, condemned the commercial for the impersonation of Omran Daqneesh. According to these, the Syrian child was not a victim of a terrorist attack, but of a Syrian or a Russian airstrike (see Figure 3). Similarly, a group of Syrian activists created the hashtag zain tušawwih al-ḥaqīqa, accusing the telecommunication company of “distorting the truth” about the Syrian conflict and whitewashing the image of Bashar al-Asad. [They used victims of attacks not carried out by ISIS, like the child Omran, as if he was a victim of ISIS. I find it absurd that they only blame ISIS for all the suffering] Figure 3. Comment criticizing the commercial

I suggest that linguistic and historical dynamics play a central role in the erasure of the Syrian dissidents’ position through synchronization. Indeed, the telecommunication company, the commercial producers, and the commenters “speak from” a very specific historical position (Blommaert 2005: 126), that of the “synchronic […] here-and-now” (Blommaert 2005: 141), characterized by the dominant discourse of terrorism as an international threat. On the other hand, Syrian dissidents see the commercial as a communicative event from the historical perspective of the Syrian uprising and the Syrian conflict. For Syrian dissidents, the Syrian uprising represented a chronotopic event through which they irreversibly repositioned themselves sociopolitically (Sinatora 2019), and which allowed them to evaluate the commercial’s message within its complex historical framework. While this allowed them to deconstruct the synchronization through argumentation, it is the very linguistic-historical discrepancy of discursive and algorithmic synchronization that prevented the emergence of their argumentative perspective. Since 2017, new comments have continued to be added to the video, particularly around the time of Ramadan. These comments do not address the content of the video directly, but they express enthusiasm for the arrival of Ramadan, anticipation for the new Zain commercial, and sorrow for more recent terrorist attacks. Similar to the 2017 and 2018 reactions, these newer comments attest to

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the effectiveness of the commercial’s synchronization. A remarkable trend is that critical comments, such as the political ones posted by Syrian dissidents, are no longer visible. This can be explained by the ranking algorithm of the YouTube comments section, which yields more visibility to the most recent and the top comments. This algorithm depends on four factors, as explained by Cole Dixon in a thread in the software programmers’ community “Stackoverflow”: the posting time of a comment, the like/dislike ratio of a commenter’s previous YouTube comments, the number of replies to a specific comment, and the person who posted the comment.5 I argue that the cyclical reproduction of new comments and the consequent erasure of older ones enhance the linguistic and multimodal synchronization in the commercial, engendering an algorithmic type of synchronization.

7.

Synchronization, social media, and soft affective politics

The theory of synchronization preceded the advent of social media: its development, as explained by Blommaert (2005), was strongly inspired by the work of French historian Fernand Braudel and that of sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein. Its postulation, however, is useful to understand political discourse in a socialmedia dominated society, an endeavour consistent with Blommaert’s (2018) call for a sociolinguistics that investigates the “anachronistic effects” of digital algorithms in connection with identity, society, and power (84–88). The “technodiscursive” structure of social media, in which the “phatic” aspect of communication is dominant (KhosraviNik 2018; Miller 2008), has transformed audiences into “prosumers” – (i.e., producers and consumers, Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010, as cited in KhosraviNik 2018) – and contributed to the power of synchronization, enhancing its “thick” (Blommaert 2018) political effects. The use of YouTube pop videos with relevance to sociopolitical issues is an increasingly widespread phenomenon in the Arab world. In 2014, the same Emirati singer who featured in the Zain commercial also performed a catchy pop song in a viral video, exhorting Egyptians to national unity and to vote in the elections which led to current president al-Sisi’s victory. In the video, featuring happy Egyptians dancing to the pop song and carrying signs exhorting people to vote, linguistic and multimodal hybridity helped to synchronize a political and nationalist message in support of al-Sisi with a message of hope for a bright future (Gameel and El Ghetany 2019). Interestingly, the video

5. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27781751/what-is-youtube-comment-system-sortingranking-algorithm?answertab=active#tab-top.

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triggered similar emotional reactions from Arab and international audiences as the Zain 2017 one (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. International comment on the 2014 boshret kheir video

Other examples include subsequent Ramadan advertisements produced by Zain, tackling issues like the refugee crisis and interfaith tolerance. The latest 2019 commercial, for example, condemns sectarian violence using similar indexical strategies, this time including full vocalization in the Arabic captions. The utilization of these online pop videos to carry political messages arguably constitutes a new political genre. Whereas research has predominantly focused on examples of divisive affective politics utilized by right-wing movements and their leaders (see KhosraviNik 2017a), the present study parses soft affective politics that capitalize on the indexicality of multimodal communication, on social media affordances, and on dominant discourses through progressive rhetoric. In this type of affective political discourse, linguistic and multimodal resources are used to trigger positive reactions and frame the message as progressive, unifying, and universal. This type of soft politics is not entirely new in the Middle East. Through her extensive research on Syrian TV drama productions, Della Ratta (2015) coined the term “whisper politics” to explain how the political message underlying these soap operas is the result of a communion of intents between an elite of progressive producers and a government that portrays itself as modern. The producers of the Zain commercial and the lead singer are presumably moved by similar progressive intents. What distinguishes this type of commercial from previous forms of mediatized politics is its participatory nature (KhosraviNik 2017b, 2018) and the scale on which these messages are disseminated. Through social media algorithmic synchronization, the message can reach domestic, regional, and international audiences, whose reactions are presumed to have an impact on the populations directly involved in political elections. As illustrated through the example of the 2017 Zain commercial, the positive YouTube audience reactions, in continuity with the emotional message of the commercial, contribute to the depoliticization of historical and political issues. The condemnation of terrorist attacks perpetrated by extremist groups identifying themselves with Sunni Islam, such as ISIS and Al Qaeda, as well as the minimization of the Syrian government’s involvement in war crimes, are presumably attempts to appease the Kuwaiti Shia community. At the same time, such a condemnation helped to mitigate Kuwait’s disagreement with the Syrian government, it whitewashed Kuwait’s reputation as a state which

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sponsored terrorism, and it justified its “fighting terror” narrative and policies (Baxter 2016) through soft tools. Synchronization constitutes a central component in the “de-politicization of communication as politics” characterizing affective politics (KhosraviNik 2018: 431). The ‘soft’ component is sustained by two elements. First, by ‘traveling’ on social media, these videos appear to be detached from the achievement of contingent political objectives. They do so by emphasizing the emotive aspect of social media activities. In this sense, it can be construed as an ideological capitalization of the fictitious separation between online and offline sociality (see Al Zidjaly 2019; Blommaert 2018). Secondly, the ‘softness’ derives from the persuasive tones utilized in the video, resulting from the indexical meanings of linguistic and multimodal hybridity. If soft affective politics is a product of synchronization, hybridity is the essence of such synchronization. As posited by Bakhtin (1981), hybridity is the encounter of “linguistic consciousnesses” (358). Through hybridity, these videos strike the intimate chords of human and social consciousnesses, making the message appear harmless, univocal, and indisputable.

8.

Conclusions

This chapter has examined the link between language and social media “affective communication” (KhosraviNik 2018) through the case study of a YouTube commercial released by the Kuwaiti telecommunication company Zain during the month of Ramadan 2017. I describe the progressive persuasive elements used in the commercial as soft affective politics. This political tactic, which uses linguistic and multimodal hybridity in order to transform a political message into a cultural one, can be understood through the notion of synchronization, explained by Blommaert (2005) as a discursive strategy through which a complex, historically multilayered message is simplified. Synchronization, as argued by Blommaert, highlights one historical perspective and results in the erasure of other individuals’ standpoints. The analysis showed how the indexicality of language, images, and music helped the Zain video producers and the YouTube commenters access the issue of terrorism from the same historical dimension, albeit for different reasons. Their historical experience is that of the “here-and-now” (Blommaert 2005), dominated by a narrative in which Islamic terrorism is the major cause of misery in the Arab and Islamic world. Such a narrative is also consistent with that of the Syrian government, which has historically portrayed itself as the only viable alternative to (Sunni) radical Islam, and which accused the 2011 civic protests of being orchestrated by extremist infiltrators. On the other hand, Syrian dissidents accused the

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company of “distorting the truth” about the Syrian conflict. They argued that, by decontextualizing the image of the Syrian boy whose house had allegedly been hit by a Russian airstrike and by making it seem that he had been a victim of Islamic terrorism, Zain colluded with the Syrian government, whitewashing its war crimes. Their reaction is rooted in a different historical dimension, that of the 2011 Syrian civic protests and the ensuing conflict. Such a reaction is chronotopic, in that it is informed by the way they have positioned themselves through social media since the 2011 uprising (see Sinatora 2019). Despite their engagement across social media platforms, however, their position failed to emerge. A focus on the digital dynamics that have contributed to the visibility of one dominant historical perspective deserves particular attention. I argued that synchronization is accentuated by YouTube algorithms, which propped up the comments synchronized with the ad, thus amplifying the discursive power of the ad’s representation and not allowing argumentative voices, such as that of the Syrian dissidents, to emerge. The algorithmic synchronization underlying soft affective discourse is in line with proposals around the need for “Techno-Discursive” approaches which situate a “micro” analysis of linguistic dynamics “horizontally” and “vertically” within the “macro” power-discursive infrastructure of digital environments (KhosraviNik 2017b, 2018), as well as with a need to understand contemporary sociolinguistic practices as multi-scalar phenomena (Blommaert 2018). In this complex communicative event, YouTube is not a neutral actor. Its business-driven algorithmic system, regulating the visibility of videos and the comments, contributes to the erasure of nondominant argumentative voices. The similarities between the multimodal strategies and the commenters’ interactional dynamics observed in the Egyptian and the Kuwaiti YouTube videos shed light on the emergence and circulation of a distinctive co-constructed digital event sustained by horizontal social media infrastructural affordances. Concomitantly, multimodal representations are rooted in and have an impact on local, regional, and international higher-scale political issues. Echoing Blommaert’s (2018) consideration of the need to assess the impact of online “light” practices vis-à-vis larger-scale historical events, I suggest that the YouTube video analyzed constitutes an example of soft affective politics. Through the indexicality of Arab and international multimodal resources, the video provokes an algorithmically amplified positive emotional reaction in a diverse audience. These small-scale practices can reinforce determined political actions in connection with largerscale historical phenomena, as exemplified by Gameel and El Ghetany’s (2019) analysis of a YouTube video released on the eve of the Egyptian presidential elections.

Social media soft affective politics through discursive and algorithmic synchronization

In sum, this chapter urges the critical study of new digitally enhanced forms of political communication as a central component of a Web 2.0 authoritarian politics that silences dissident voices through soft tones. These softer tones are reinforced in the participatory comments section, in which dominant interactional and cultural trends are prioritized by the social media structure and algorithms, thus boosting the video’s views and the platform’s profits. This new type of soft politics hinges on the participatory, algorithmic, and business-driven structure of digital media to consolidate the dominant narratives of post-Arab Spring autocracies.

Acknowledgements A first analysis of this data appeared in Sinatora (2020). I thank Majid KhosraviNik, Najma Al Zidjaly, and Sage Graham for inviting me to share my work in their panels, respectively, at the Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines (CADAAD 2018) and the International Pragmatics Association (IpRA 2019) conferences. I am particularly indebted to Najma Al Zidjaly for the many conversations we had about this data in relation to the notion of synchronization and to Majid KhosraviNik, the anonymous reviewers, and Zaynab Quadri for their feedback on previous drafts of this chapter.

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Towards an ethnographic approach to social media discourses Exploring ethnic nationalism and the Greek ‘right’ to the name ‘Macedonia’ Salomi Boukala & Dimitris Serafis

Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences | University of Malta

This chapter intends to show how the arena of political debate has relocated from Parliament to Facebook in contemporary Greece and explore the parameters and impact of such relocation in discourses of contemporary political polemics. It explores the way social media spaces combine bottomup and top-down discourses and their repercussions for discourses of national identity. We assume that social media dominate current politics not only as a source of official announcements but, quite contrarily, that platforms such as Facebook enable communication between civilians and politicians and shape a new public sphere with a new discursive dynamic. In line with studies on the Self and the Other in digital discourses of identity (e.g., KhosraviNik and Sarkhoh 2018), the chapter particularly focuses on the dispute over the name ‘Macedonia’ in Greek digital discourses. The chapter considers the research on the impact of social media on current politics and proposes an ethnographic approach for the analysis of social media discourse by integrating traditions in discourse studies, anthropology, and digital ethnography (Androutsopoulos 2008; Horst and Miller 2012; Hine 2015; KhosraviNik and Unger 2016).

Introduction The Prespa Lakes are two lakes in South Eastern Europe shared by Greece, North Macedonia, and Albania. Great Prespa separates Greece and North Macedonia and for many years has divided two different nations, each claiming a geographical region that defines their history, culture, and language. Secure borders, watchtowers, and checkpoints illustrate the distinction between the two states that extends beyond civil matters into an ideological division between the West and Communists (former Yugoslavia), as well as the dispute over the name ‘Macedonia’. On https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.100.05bou © 2023 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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17 June 2018, Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) signed an agreement on the Prespa lake district, with which they aimed to resolve the name dispute between the two neighbouring countries that goes back to the early 1990s. The agreement was ratified by the Greek Parliament on 25 January 2019, and triggered an intense debate on the Greek ‘right’ over the name ‘Macedonia’ – that also appeared on social media – although the aim of the two governments was for the Prespa Lakes to be symbolically transformed from a region of division into an area that defines friendship and good neighbours. The relocation of a political debate from Parliament to Facebook prompted us to examine social media platforms as spaces that combine bottom-up and topdown discourses in politics and national identity. We assume that social media dominate current politics not only as a source of official announcements but, quite contrarily, that platforms such as Facebook enable communication between civilians and politicians and shape a new public sphere. The impact of social media on current politics and the discursive construction of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ divisions have preoccupied scholars of digital anthropology, communication, and discourse studies (e.g., Androutsopoulos 2008; Horst and Miller 2012; Hine 2015; KhosraviNik and Unger 2016) who have investigated the construction of identities in the virtual public sphere (Papacharissi 2002). Following Marcus’ (1998) multi-sited ethnography and the Discoursehistorical Approach (henceforth DHA) to Critical Discourse Studies (henceforth CDS), this chapter examines the intersection of ethnographic and critical discourse-analytical approaches with a particular focus on the study of social media’s role in the dissemination of and commentary on political events. By emphasising multi-sited ethnography, CDS, and the discussion on Aristotelian tradition and DHA argumentation strategies, we attempt to shed light on the analysis of political (public and individual) discourses and rhetoric and illustrate the role of social media in national issues via a case study of the so-called Prespa Agreement and the Macedonian question as they take place on Facebook. Drawing on the concept of “ethnic nationalism” (Danforth 1995), and by examining two different genres of online discourse (top-down and bottom-up), we conduct a profound analysis of political/ ethnic conflicts on social media platforms and in parallel with nation-state imaginaries. In particular, our aim is, first, to analyse the Facebook posts of the main opposition party’s (New Democracy, a member of the European People’s Party) political figures, Antonis Samaras and Kyriakos Mitsotakis, on the Prespa Agreement. In a second step, we intend to identify and systematically “follow” participant individuals who engaged in the debate on the name ‘Macedonia’ and their online discourses, on the basis of Marcus’ tactics of multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1998). Given the premise that “the participatory web may have changed

Towards an ethnographic approach to social media discourses

the politics of discursive dynamics, the quality of the very content and the overall structure of discursive participation” (KhosraviNik 2020), we introduce an interdisciplinary qualitative approach to the analysis of this vague discursive terrain that is based on a synthesis of argumentation and ethnographic approaches. The coexistence of classic and modern approaches to the construction of Self and Otherness characterises this study, insofar as it emphasises nationalism studies through the prism of digital modernity.

Ethnic nationalism and Greek national identity (re)constructions According to Smith’s classic definition, a nation can be defined as “[a] named human population which shares myths and memories, a mass public culture, a designated homeland, economic unity and equal rights and duties for all members” (Smith 1995: 56–57). Gellner (1983) also underlines that the nation creates a sense of belonging and solidarity for its members, unifies them through the same culture and excludes ‘Others’ – non-members. Hence, the nation can be perceived as an “imagined community” (Anderson 2006), which is based on common symbols (i.e., national flag, national anthem, and national emblem) and an invented common history, which members of the nation accept as an absolute truth (see Castoriadis 1981: 240–244). The importance of national symbols and an invented history in the dissemination of nationalism was mainly studied by Hobsbawm (1992), who coined the term “invented tradition”. As he explains, an “invented tradition is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past” (Hobsbawm 1992: 1) or, as we assume, viewed through the prism of “banal nationalism” (Billig 1995). Thus, national symbols and an invented tradition foster a sense of a historical continuity and an imagined bond between the members of a nation, while, moreover, according to Castoriadis, the imaginary character of the nation seems to be the most accepted “reality” by the people, since it was peoples’ identification with nations that led to two world wars and the rise of nationalism (see Castoriadis 1981: 189–191). The meaning of nationalism includes various stereotypes and biases that are different in every society. A nation is defined through a process of exclusion, just as the self is defined in opposition to another (Geertz 1973). Thus, nationalism involves subjective interpretation and is based on the historical memories of a nation and its relations with ‘Others’ – excluded from the nation (Smith 1991; Demertzis 1996). One of the most significant and popular forms of nationalism is “Ethnic Nationalism” (Delanty and O’Mahony 2002; Kallis 2011), which can

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be considered as an attempt to maintain or recreate a sense of identity and community under the threat of cultural assimilation or annihilation (Connor 1978; Danforth 1995). Following Barth’s (1998) work on ethnic groups and by highlighting ethnicity and cultural homogeneity for the identification of a nation, in the next paragraphs we provide some insights into the construction of Greek national imaginaries. The unity of the nation was secured by Greek national identity, which underlined the cultural homogeneity and common origin of the Greeks, and their differentiation from ‘Others’, and led to the institution of the modern Greek nation-state in 1830 (see Kontogiorgis 2006, 2012). National identity provides an important means for defining and locating individuals in a new form of coexistence, which is based on a shared culture and a common nation (see Gellner 1983; Smith 1991; Kedourie 1992; Woolf 1995). However, it also divides people, since it is based on negative stereotypes regarding ‘Others’ vis-à-vis positive representations about the members of the nation-state (Billig 1995). ‘Greekness’ was related to common ancestry, cultural traditions, and religion. This triple boundary distinguished Greeks from the peoples of the Ottoman Empire who did not share the same religion as the Greeks, and from their South-Slavic neighbours, who had a different cultural past (see Triandafyllidou 1998, 2009; Triandafyllidou and Veikou 2002; Kontogiorgis 2012; Tsoukalas 2013). Hence, the new independent Greek state sought its origin in the cultural distinctions of Greeks from their contiguous neighbours. According to Tsoukalas (2013), the constitution of the Greek nation-state on the basis of a European idealisation of Greek Antiquity and the traditional links between Greece and the East led to the construction of an ambiguous national identity, which comprised an admiration of both Ancient Greece and Greek Orthodox religion. In particular, the Greeks separated themselves from their neighbours, as they were seeking their roots in Ancient Greece; and at the same time, they did not renounce the Byzantine Empire and their orthodox tradition, and they did not distinguish the state from the Orthodox Church (see Tsoukalas 2013: 55–67). Until today, the most important features of Greek official national identity are the Greek language and religion. These two elements contribute to the creation of the Greek nation’s traditions, insofar as modern Greeks are characterised by significant percentages of linguistic and religious homogeneity of the population (Kontogiorgis 2006, 2012; Lekkas 2006). Consequently, Greek national identity is based on the idea of continuity of the nation from Ancient Greece and the Byzantine Empire, and on the linguistic and religious homogeneity of the Greek population. The cultural tradition of Alexander the Great did not constitute a fundamental element of Greek identity until recently (Karakasidou 1993; Triandafyllidou 1998).

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The Republic of Macedonia declared its independence on 8 September 1991 and brought to the fore the Macedonian heritage and its meaning to Greeks. The claims of FYROM activated Greek nationalism and led to a redefinition of Greek national identity. At this point, Alexander’s heritage turned into a core element of Greekness, and ‘Macedonia’ became synonymous with Greek nationalism (Danforth 1993, 1995; Triandafyllidou 1998). Moreover, the Macedonian question was raised in a period of economic and sociopolitical crisis in Greece and illustrated the political dimension of national identity, which can be used by the political elites of the nation-state in order to disorientate the people from their internal problems. During this period, the cultural and territorial threat from FYROM unified Greeks against a common enemy that declared its right to identify itself as Macedonian. The Macedonian question has shaped Greek foreign policy in the Balkans and prompted a resurgence in Greek nationalism in recent decades. A shared premise among Greek officials was the following twofold one: (a) securing Greece’s territorial integrity against (Macedonian) irredentist views and (b) strengthening peace in the Balkans (see Sfetas 2018; Syrigos and Hatzivasileiou 2019). Moreover, as Kotzias (2018) explicates, the Greek government (SYRIZA) favoured the Prespa Agreement, since that would significantly facilitate Greece regaining (political, economic, military, etc.) hegemony in the Balkans (Kotzias 2018: 12). In this chapter, we are concerned with the revival of the dispute between Greece and North Macedonia over the name ‘Macedonia’ and the imprint of social media on the reconstructions of national imaginaries.

Synthesising multi-sited digital ethnography and critical discourse studies The role of social media as a vehicle for information, entertainment, or even activism has long been of interest to scholars of different disciplines. Hence, numerous publications on researching online practices and structures have appeared from different social scientific perspectives, including discourse and media studies, but only a few papers have set out to combine online ethnography and sociolinguistics (Androutsopoulos 2008), or emphasise the parameters of CDS in analysing digital discourse (KhosraviNik and Zia 2014; KhosraviNik and Unger 2016; KhosraviNik 2017; Potts et al. 2014). In this multidisciplinary scholarly universe, approaches that draw particularly on the main principles of CDS claim that in new “techno-discursive” settings (KhosraviNik 2018) such as social media platforms, CDS practitioners should primarily take into consideration “what discursive opportunities are provided by new communicative affordances, new tools, and new resources” (KhosraviNik 2020) in their overall attempts to (re)establish principles and methods to better unravel and critique the discursive

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ways in which power inequalities are (re)produced in particular online settings; this is a rapidly developing branch of approaches on the scholarly agenda of CDS, labelled Social Media CDS (henceforth SM-CDS) (e.g., KhosraviNik 2017, 2020). Within this framework, the present research intends to constitute an interdisciplinary methodological approach that highlights the importance of in-depth qualitative analysis of social media texts by employing a methodological amalgamation that combines ethnographic approaches and argumentation strategies in the critical study of social media, especially Facebook discourses. The immediate and interactive character of Facebook is linked to a debate that builds on the ongoing social media activity of specific actors, but also on their dynamic interactions with other users and political figures. Through this prism, the primary research approach in our study draws on the tradition of multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995, 2012) and aims to offer new dimensions in online critical discourseanalytical work by incorporating ethnography-assisted research on various sites, such as (social) media and civil society. As Marcus (1995) notes: Multi-sited ethnography is intellectually constructed in terms of the specific constructions and discourses appearing within a number of highly self-conscious interdisciplinary arenas that use the diverse theoretical capital that inspires postmodernism to reconfigure the conditions for the study of contemporary cultures and societies. (Marcus 1995: 103)

Accordingly, one of the main aims of this research is to study online discursive strategies and the horizontal contextualization of political statements and debates within a new socio-technological context that a multi-sited terrain of communication provides: social media. In fact, studies belonging to SM-CDS attempt “a more explicit approach to case studies by combining the observational approaches of screen data, e.g., online ethnography” (KhosraviNik and Amer 2020; see also KhosraviNik 2017). For us, the ethnography of Facebook users is built upon the systematic observation of specific politicians (i.e., Antonis Samaras and Kyriakos Mitsotakis) and two Facebook users who either encode or oppose the Greek nationalist political agenda. Our research emphasises the issues of the public sphere and political conflicts, insofar as the users under investigation represent the dynamics of two opposite groups that dominate the public debate in relevant contexts. The absence of interviews and physical interaction between us and the participants on the level of our ethnographic study may be considered a paradox or a limitation of our ethnographic approach. However, as KhorsaviNik and Amer (2020) note, “[d]rawing on insights from Androutsopoulos (2013), an SM-CDS understanding entails a focus on screenbased data and practices, as distinct from (a) analysing content in isolation and (b) focusing on the ethnographies of participants rather than discourse-

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oriented visible practices”. From that perspective, as we will show, ethnographic approaches, and especially multi-sited ethnography, can be seen as a multifaceted set of methodological approaches that can support new modes of critical, interdisciplinary study in the digital era. Here, we should also notice that digital research and ethnography was used by scholars of the field over 20 years ago (Markham 2020). In this chapter we attempt to combine Marcus’ follow strategies and the DHA in the study of Facebook. According to Blommaert and Dong (2010): ‘True’ ethnography is rare […] ethnography is perceived as a method for collecting particular types of data and thus as something that can be added, like the use of a computer, to different scientific procedures and programs … In the field of language, ethnography is popularly perceived as a technique and a series of propositions by means of which something can be said about ‘context’. (Blommaert and Dong 2010: 6)

Under this premise, we draw on the “follow the metaphor” and “follow the plot, story or allegory” techniques of multi-sited ethnography (see Marcus 1995: 108–109). These specific “following on-” techniques provide us with the opportunity to examine linguistic modes and discourses in detail and synthesise them with political and national identity issues in a rather unexplored context, adding, in this sense, to the armoury of methods that might facilitate a better interpretation and critique from a CDS perspective. We will further explicate this point in the discussion that follows. As Marcus (1998) further explains: The development of multi-sited strategies for doing ethnography so as to discover and define more complex and surprising objects of study is literally one important way at present to expand the significance and power, while at the same time changing the form of ethnographic knowledge … In short, within a multi-sited research imaginary, tracing and describing the connections and relationships among sites previously thought incommensurate is ethnography’s way of making arguments and providing its own contexts of significance. (Marcus 1998: 14)

In other words, Marcus’ approach is based on mobility. The ethnographer should be willing to move around rather than remaining static in a specific community. S/he has to “follow” the participants and their discourses and become engaged with the field in order to conduct a connected ethnography on various sites such as (social) media and society. Moreover, according to Hine (2015), such an approach can contribute to the development of ethnographic strategies for the study of an “embodied, embedded, everyday” Internet. As she also notes, “[e]ven if we choose to follow the Internet (or rather, some aspect of the Internet) as the

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object of study across different sites, it would be a mistake to expect it to be a stable and identifiable object in different settings” (Hine 2015: 71). In our attempt to better inform our critical-discourse analytical perspective on Facebook, the aforementioned techniques provide us with the conceptual ground on which, among other things, we can develop principles to follow our informants’ (online and offline) activities to collect our data. Concurrently, these specific techniques enable a better contextualization of the production and distribution of these data by understanding informants’ individual points of juxtaposition and/or support for Greek ethnic nationalistic perspectives as well as their overall ideological background and positioning in this particular case (i.e., the Macedonian issue). As we perceive it, social media networking platforms, such as Facebook, provide a context where a scholar can become embedded and embodied in different forms of fieldwork that can support an in-depth study through the strategies of multi-sited ethnography. From a SM-CDS perspective, this approach offers us the opportunity to access “patterns of users’ textual/ semiotic/ etc. practices in their online worlds” (KhosraviNik 2017: 585; see also KhosraviNik 2015: 6) while elucidating users’ background and everyday practices in order for us “to view the findings within a wider context [since] discourse formations and perceptions occur within a mix of mediatised and social practices” (KhosraviNik 2017: 586; see also KhosraviNik & Unger 2016). From our perspective, being able to develop techniques that frame and therefore sharpen a micro-textual analysis of social media discourses is a crucial objective for CDS scholars who operate in such unexplored sociotechnological contexts. Thus, in our view, this integration opens up new avenues for the study of the virtual public sphere and can highlight the discursive construction of in-groups and out-groups on social media through the parallel usage of the DHA and CDS.

The discourse-historical approach and argumentation Following on from the above, in a second step, we draw on the principles of DHA which, crucially, allows us to analyse the discursive construction of actors, actions, events, and concepts by investigating hegemonic political discourse across different (usually four) levels of context (historical context, situational context, and text-internal co-text, as well as intertextual and interdiscursive relations), and it offers a clear set of theoretically defined categories for analysing discursive practices employed in both written and oral texts (see Reisigl and Wodak 2016). Our aim is to illustrate the ways in which the DHA can reveal silent strategies that lead to the discursive distinction between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ on the basis of historical and

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sociopolitical parameters in times of crisis, by emphasising both top-down and bottom-up discourses that underpin or oppose nationalist identities. We assume that this synthesis provides a lens for a more holistic analysis of social media discourses on the Macedonian question and the discursive construction of Greekness. Drawing, particularly, upon DHA argumentation studies (Reisigl and Wodak 2001) and following the Aristotelian tradition (Aristotle 2004, Rhetoric B23), we approach topos (pl. topoi) as a rhetorical and dialectical scheme that offers the opportunity for a systematic in-depth analysis of different statements that represent accepted knowledge – endoxon – and which are usually employed by orators or opponents to persuade their audience of the validity of their opinions (Boukala 2016, 2019). Furthermore, a topos should be understood as a quasi “elliptic” argument (an enthymeme), where the premise is followed by a conclusion without giving any explicit evidence, while taking the conclusion to relate to endoxon (Boukala 2016). Though this interrelation of topical and endoxical premises, argument schemes (see topoi) are instantiated in real-life contexts (see, e.g., the Greek context during the debate revolving around the Macedonian issue), towards the emergence of specific claims/ standpoints (see also Rigotti and Greco 2019). In the present case, we seek to examine the topoi that interrelate with the endoxon of the Greek nationalistic agenda that can be labelled as follows: Greece has the exclusive ‘right’ to use the name ‘Macedonia’.

Ethnography of users and selection: Provisional ethnographic findings Our research comprises Facebook data sets for four different users that refer to the Prespa Agreement. In a first step we analyse two political figures’ Facebook comments on the Agreement. Our decision to focus on Antonis Samaras’ and Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ social media discourses is linked to our attempt to examine the political debate on the Prespa Agreement and how this has been developed by two of the main figures of the conservative party, New Democracy, that opposed the Agreement. Moreover, by “following” two informants within Facebook, we also proceed to an online ethnographic study. We did not select our actors in a random way or on the basis of their Facebook popularity. On the contrary, we decided to study the discourse of these specific users on the basis of the following criteria: (a) both users were active in the relevant debate and (b) they were representative cases of views that carried significant weight in the Greek public sphere, i.e., in favour of (left-wing) and against (conservative) the Agreement. In particular, the first participant – Maria – is a 35-year-old female who has a degree in Logistics and works in a family business. She strongly opposed the Agreement. The second

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participant, Giorgos,1 is a 34-year-old male who has a bachelor’s degree in Greek Philology (Classical studies), a master’s degree in Theatrical Studies, and works in a shopping mall. He favoured the Agreement in his discourse. On the basis of the principles sketched out by Marcus’ multi-sited ethnography (1995, 1998, 2012), we proceeded to conduct a systematic participant observation of the aforementioned Facebook users for more than two months, which enabled us not only to focus on their communicative activities during the debate, but also to decode their national and political viewpoints. This procedure also included a more personal engagement with our informants, namely “following” them and chatting on Messenger on a regular basis, and a discussion of the overall sociopolitical debate in Greece in a specific time span, with a particular focus on the Macedonian issue. In this sense, we were able to confirm some preliminary assumptions: Maria is a social-democratically oriented citizen. Although this specific political tradition historically favoured a solution to the Macedonian issue via a mutual agreement between Greece and FYROM on a name that would be geographically determined (erga omnes), she, nevertheless, displayed a more nationalist orientation on the issue, while sometimes following the nationalist endoxical premise according to which Greece is the only party that should use the name ‘Macedonia’. In contrast, Giorgos, oriented towards the left-wing political spectrum, favoured the solution suggested by the Greek government in the Prespa Agreement (i.e., a geographically determined name – erga omnes obligation), although, traditionally, left-wing political positionings in Greece did not pay much attention to the dispute.2 These, sometimes contradictory, tendencies were also leading informants’ digital practices (e.g., Facebook posts, discussions on Messenger); we will examine these practices in more detail in a later section. As such, we claim that systematic participant observation for a focused period that is based on a multi-sited approach can provide us with crucial contextual insights regarding the representation of the ‘Other’ through social media, the discursive construction of ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups’, and the study of hegemonic discourses that a CDS perspective would otherwise miss. In other words, the 1. Due to ethical concerns relating to protecting our informants’ identity, we use nicknames for the two participants that are based on popular Greek names. 2. This fact was pinpointed by several representatives of the mainstream right-wing party New Democracy in their attempt to oppose the negotiating capacities of the Greek, left-wing oriented, government of SYRIZA on the Macedonian issue. See, for instance, the talk given by New Democracy MP, Makis Voridis, on the respective discussion in the Greek Parliament where, among other things, he stated: “Since you do not care, since you wanted the solution including [only] the name ‘Macedonia’ [i.e. instead of FYROM or some other – geographically determined – name], since you never gave a penny for the national issue, you are a government of national bidding.” (Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Am-g5XVj8ps).

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proposed approach can be seen as a way to systematically and profoundly cover both top-down and bottom-up discourses (i.e., politicians and ordinary voices), as well as providing insights into the contextual premises of bottom-up discourses’ production, development, and dissemination in the new techno-discursive arena. Under these premises, next, our data analysis follows.

Communicating Greek patriotism on Facebook: Top-down discourses Starting our analysis, we focused on arguments emerging in discourses of the two selected politicians – prominent figures in the mainstream centre-right Greek party, New Democracy (i.e., Antonis Samaras and Kyriakos Mitsotakis). Antonis Samaras was New Democracy’s president and served as Prime Minister of Greece from 2012 to 2015. Samaras also served as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1989 to 1992 and built his name and political career on the Macedonian issue. In particular, in 1992, he disagreed with a composite name solution for FYROM proposed by the then Prime Minister, Konstantinos Mitsotakis, resulting in a political turmoil that led to the collapse of the New Democracy government. After being dropped by New Democracy, Samaras founded Politiki Anixi (Political Spring), an ultranationalist party that emphasized the Macedonian question. Politiki Anixi gained 4.9% of the vote in the 1993 national election. However, the oblivion of the Macedonian naming dispute led Samaras’ party into decline. Hence, in the 1996 national election, the party did not enter Parliament. In 2004, Samaras dissolved Politiki Anixi, rejoined New Democracy, and was elected president of the conservative party in 2009. Samaras never hid his nationalist sentiments and, as such, fiercely opposed the Prespa Agreement. His political views on the issue were communicated through his Facebook profile, where he uploaded his speech in the Greek Parliament during the debate on the Prespa Agreement’s approval on 25 January 2019. He began his speech with an appeal to national emotions that condensed his main argument. (1) The main argument is summarized in seven words: There is only one Macedonia and it is Greek. And this is not a slogan created by nationalists. It is the historical truth.

He, thereafter, refers to the history of the Balkans and the Balkan wars to justify the ‘historical truth’ of his argument. As he also notes: (2) The Macedonian issue arose in 1944. Then, the US Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius, condemned any reference to Macedonian ethnicity, calling it a potentially ‘offensive action against Greece’. Was he a right-wing extremist, a nationalist?

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As transpires from Extracts (1) and (2), Samaras insists on the Greekness of Macedonia and legitimizes his argument by referring to different moments in the history of the Balkans. In this vein, he constructs a ‘historical truth’ that emphasizes the Greek position and conceals many political and ideological dimensions of the Balkan wars. This argument is further supported by a synthesis of the DHA’s topos of history (Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 80) and the Aristotelian topos of nomination (Aristotle 2004, Rhetoric B23:1400b) that here can be labelled as the topos of Macedonia’s Greekness and elaborated through the conditional “if Macedonia is derived from Greek history, then Macedonia is Greek”. Samaras develops his argument by quoting Edward Stettinius’ statement on the Macedonian issue. Edward Stettinius served as US Secretary of State from 1944 to 1945, an obscure historical period for Greece and the Balkans that was stigmatized by the Second World War, the Greek civil war, and the US intervention in it. The recontextualization of Stettinius’ statement illustrates Samaras’ ideological position, insofar as he implicitly recognizes the alliance between the US and Greece by referring to Stettinius as an authority who supports Greek national interests. Moreover, Samaras’ appeal to Stettinius’ authority is substantiated by the utilization of a rhetorical question: “Was he a right-wing extremist, a nationalist?”, which decries the government’s critique of the Prespa Agreement’s opponents. Samaras, thus, builds a dichotomy between supporters of the Agreement and its opponents, who have been characterized as extremists or nationalists via the Aristotelian topos of indication (Aristotle 2004, B23:1401b) that can be paraphrased as “Although nationalists oppose the Prespa Agreement, if someone is against the Agreement then s/he cannot always be considered a nationalist.” In addition, Samaras refers to the French President, François Mitterand, and France’s opposition to the usage of the name Macedonia by Skopje. (3) In 1993 the then French President, François Mitterand, noted that Skopje could not be recognized by the name Macedonia because this would be against the Greek conscience. Was he a right-wing extremist?

Through the recontextualization of a socialist political figure’s quote on the usage of the same and the repetition of a rhetorical question, Samaras emphasizes his argument by building on an irony that criticizes Syriza’s left-wing government to characterize, as nationalists, opponents of the Prespa Agreement. He also refers to Greek figures (historians, politicians, academics) who oppose the Prespa Agreement, wondering: (4) Are they all nationalists? They are Greeks who are not being appreciated by your party because they are not national nihilists!

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Thus, Samaras openly accuses Syriza and supporters of the Prespa Agreement of being national nihilists, illustrates his nationalist sentiments, and creates a dichotomy between Greeks who do not accept the usage of the name Macedonia by a Slavic nation (‘Us’) and national nihilists (‘Them’). Thereafter, Samaras summarizes his opposition to the Agreement. As he mentioned: (5) With the Prespa Agreement, Greece accepts FYROM’s irredentist claims and recognizes Macedonian identity, ethnicity and language. FYROM’s irredentism is legitimized by the Prespa Agreement … Greece recognizes Macedonian nationality and citizenship. In other words, a Macedonian nation-state.

Here, the former Prime Minister explicates the disadvantages of the Agreement and emphasizes the threat to the Greek nation by employing the Aristotelian topos of the consequential (Aristotle 2004, B23:1399a), or the topos of the Prespa Agreement threat, that can be paraphrased as: “If the Prespa Agreement is validated then Macedonia will not be only Greek.” Indeed, he depicts his vision of the threat from FYROM’s irredentism by referring to Macedonian identity, ethnicity, language, nationality, and citizenship. He does not explicate the concepts or the Agreement further and cultivates a vague climate concerning who could be labelled Macedonian (Greeks or Northern Macedonians). Finally, Samaras repeats that: (6) …‘there is only one Macedonia and it is Greek’ is the slogan used by millions of proud Greeks who are gathered to protest against the Prespa Agreement.

Here, he signifies his support for the protests against the Agreement and emphasizes Macedonia’s Greekness. Samaras’ support for the protesters was not only expressed through his parliamentary speech; quite the contrary, he participated in the protests and uploaded videos to Facebook, and his statements during the protests, with many of his Facebook friends and followers endorsing his political and personal position on the Macedonian question. Many of them also indicated their excitement and agreement with his arguments during his speech via realtime comments.3 Through an appeal to national emotions, his arguments about Macedonia’s Greekness and the discursive dichotomy between Greek patriots and national nihilists, Samaras made progress in the social media game by ensuring supporters for his party. 3. https://www.facebook.com/AntonisSamaras.official/videos/389653878460951/; https:// www.facebook.com/AntonisSamaras.official/?__tn__=%2CdkC-R&eid=ARDXcKc7Sf5S5JcE83Q369u9ZWvJdZRbL2gxn8GyjUTz_p__ui1Qp4gXqwdnTv3k3AelEhBWVbF53WM&hc _ref=ARTzosW5jaxF45_dRgTtgj47sPYGY8rEHcRooWdxADyxTh2xs4F7-ToFy6CteQS2nBE [Accessed 17 November 2019].

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In contrast to Antonis Samaras, his political successor and the current Prime Minister of Greece, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, did not emphasize the Prespa Agreement on Facebook. His references to the Agreement were restricted to a video that presented his main statement on the issue.4 As he mentioned, through an appeal to emotions: (7) We will not divide Greeks to unite Skopje. I do not tolerate a comparison between patriotism and nationalism. Our grandfathers and our fathers who fought for our fatherland were not extremists. They were patriots!

By employing the Aristotelian topos of indication (see above), he emphasizes the antithesis between patriotism and nationalism and decries Syriza’s government for the falsification of recent Greek history and the stigmatisation of Greek patriots. Patriotism is based on positive feelings and cultivates a sense of identity for the members of a nation and creates a cohesive in-group. In contrast, nationalism is based on negative feelings towards other national out-groups. However, the boundary between the two concepts is frequently ambiguous insofar as patriotism may also be accompanied by negative attitudes towards foreign nations that threaten the in-group (Bar-Tal 1993; Billig 1995). We argue that Mitsotakis’ appeal to patriotism conceals a negative representation of FYROM as a threat to Greekness and Macedonia. The following extract from his Facebook video summarises his argument: (8) Negotiations on the Macedonia issue had to start on the basis of FYROM’s irredentist claims. The Prespa Agreement encourages Skopje’s irredentist sentiments.

By emphasizing FYROM’s irredentism, Kyriakos Mitsotakis discursively constructs a national enemy that derives from the Prespa Agreement via the topos of Prespa Agreement’s threat (see above). Another important point about Mitsotakis’ Facebook profile is the absence of any references to the Greek right and the name Macedonia. The topoi of history and nomination are absent from his argumentation. This may relate to his political and family tradition;5 however, this prompted his Facebook followers to criticize his position and the fact that he did not participate in the protests against the Prespa Agreement. 4. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10155382099132725 [Accessed 17 November 2019]. 5. Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ father and late conservative Prime Minister konstantinos Mitsotakis said in February 1993 that the name dispute between Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) was not that important, adding that “no one will remember [the incident] 10 years from now.”

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Thus, Samaras was applauded on social media for his position, while Mitsotakis’ appeal to patriotism did not succeed in persuading his Facebook commentators about his patriotic feelings for Macedonia. In light of this analysis, next, we focus on the analysis of our informants’ discourse on the relevant discussion.

Facebook as a terrain of digital activism and political debate: Bottom-up discourses On the dates of the protests against the Agreement in Athens and Thessaloniki, respectively, Maria uploaded many videos and comments regarding the demonstrations, although she did not participate in them. This prompted us to ask her about her ‘persistence’ on the issue. (9) I have uploaded all those videos because I feel that all of us had to inform other people about the situation and show that millions of people expressed their opposition to the Agreement. The journalists decided to hide the truth. They betrayed Greece, just like the politicians.

Based on her claim that journalists and politicians were traitors, we discussed the differentiation between patriots and nationalists. The following extracts reveal her opinion: (10) All those people are patriots. They protest because they want to support Greece, our country, our history, our children … They (Syriza) said that protesters are extremists, nationalists. No, they are not. They are real patriots who love their country, in contrast to politicians who have sold our country. (11) Nationalists? What nationalists? if you love and support your country you are accused of being nationalist? It is a matter of patriotism, something that can be considered taboo for the left … and this is a problem for the left. The left sold our country, our territory, our history.

An example of patriotic shorthand argumentation also appeared in her comment on her personal page on Facebook: “Greeks are the only people who are trying to protect their territory against their government’s intention (to sell it)”, getting more than 30 likes. Through generalisations and historical falsifications regarding patriots and the left, she signifies her opposition to the Agreement and Syriza’s government. Her arguments are further supported by the topos of indication, which criticizes Greek patriots’ stigmatization as nationalists; and the topos of Prespa Agreement’s threat, which underlines Skopje’s territorial and historical claims. The aforementioned topoi and our discussion revealed her identification with New Democ-

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Figure 1.

racy’s political figures’ argumentation. Hence, we proceeded to a political discussion on Syriza and the New Democracy debate. As she mentioned: (12) No, I do not think that Syriza’s government is the only actor responsible for this betrayal. Mitsotakis and Tsipras are both traitors. They have sold our country. I do not trust any politicians. Samaras … yes, he expressed his opposition to the Agreement and supported us on Macedonia, but who can trust him? I think that it is a game within New Democracy. They want to show that they do not agree with Tsipras’ Agreement, but I’m sure that Mitsotakis will not deny the EU’s rules. He has agreed that Macedonia has to be sold.

Once again, she indicates her opposition to politicians through generalisations and insists that Macedonia was sold out by all the politicians, an argument also used by extremists and nationalists. A few days after the announcement of a snap election, Maria started a campaign on Facebook to convince her ‘friends’ to vote. She commented in public: ‘The consequence of not being interested in politics is that you will be governed by idiots’ – quoting Plato. As she further explained to us: (13) I do not understand why people did not go to vote … Yes, I’m very fond of democracy. Democracy was born in Greece. I think that Plato was absolutely right.

Here, we observe a paradox. Although she declared that she does not trust politicians, she insists on voting through falsely quoting Plato and underlying Greek democracy. As she also mentioned after the election results, “Syriza sold Macedonia and people punished its government”, an argument that was further developed by the fallacious topos of the aftermath (Aristotle 2004, B23:1401b), or the

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Figure 2.

topos of Syriza’s electoral failure, which can be paraphrased as: “If Syriza’s government betrayed Macedonia, then it accepts an electoral failure.” As the antipodes, Giorgos favoured the Prespa Agreement and actively participated in relevant debates. He appeared to be indignant at extreme right-wing rallies (as he called them) revolving around the Macedonian issue and against ratification of the Agreement by the Greek parliament. Almost immediately, he told us: (14) Let’s be honest: it is called Macedonia by everyone in the whole world. The only patriotic and feasible decision is the Prespa Agreement. In Greece we oppose it, I mean, the nationalists oppose it [i.e., the Agreement] because in Greece there has never been an Enlightenment movement.

This last comment and the comparison between the Enlightenment and Greek nationalism prompted us to ask him to clarify a bit more his view on the politics implemented by the Greek government and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Syriza). As he stated: (15) Kotzias is right and he has compromised in a wonderful manner all the different ethnicities and their interests (i.e., Albanians’ and Slavomacedonians’ interests) in FYROM.

He concluded by adding: (16) Syriza actually implements Greece’s political perspective as stated by New Democracy’s government in Bucharest (in 2008). This (Prespa Agreement) is New Democracy’s political legacy; however, New Democracy does not support it [i.e., the Agreement] in order to unite their ultranationalist party and gain relevant votes.

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Giorgos openly consents to the Prespa Agreement and FYROM’s right to the usage of the name Macedonia through the assumption: “It is called Macedonia by everyone in the whole world.” He also underlines his antithesis to the rallies by characterizing them as nationalist. Furthermore, he reveals his opposition to Greek nationalism through the discursive construction of a division between the Enlightenment and Greek nationalism that is implicitly identified with obscurantism via the Aristotelian fallacious topos that accepts as a cause something that is not a cause (Aristotle 2004, B23:1401b). Here, Giorgos adds a historical dimension to his argument in order to convince us of its rightness; however, like Maria earlier, he builds upon a fallacious syllogism. Thereafter, Giorgos explicates that the then Foreign minister, Kotzias, proceeded with an Agreement that ensures different ethnicities’ interests and, in this vein, he reveals his opposition to ethnic nationalism and New Democracy’s political strategies. He also criticizes New Democracy by presenting the Prespa Agreement as a result of those diplomatic operations that were completed in Bucharest in 2008 by the New Democracy government. Giorgo’s criticism of New Democracy’s opposition to the Prespa Agreement is not limited to our private discussions. He underlined the conservative party’s hypocrisy in public through various comments. A characteristic example of his intense criticism was the uploading of this caricature:

Figure 3.

Here, Kyriakos Mitsotakis replies to the question: ‘Kyriako, how are you gonna leave Alexis (Tsipras) speechless?’ ‘I’m gonna say, I wish God could take for me parliamentary seats and offer you votes due to the Prespa Agreement.’ Giorgos re-utilizes this caricature that was published by a leftist newspaper and ridicules New Democracy’s leader, who seems to know that the Agreement would lead to Syriza’s and Tsipra’s electoral failure. Thus, Giorgos criticizes New

Towards an ethnographic approach to social media discourses

Democracy’s political strategy to oppose the Agreement through a recontextualization based on a caricature and by constructing an argument on the basis of the fallacious topos of the aftermath (Aristotle 2004, B23:1401b), or the topos of Syriza’s electoral failure, which can be paraphrased here as: “If the Greek nationalists are against the Agreement, then Syriza’s government, that orchestrated the Agreement, will accept an electoral failure.” The usage of different conditions that refer to the same topos, at first sight, seems to be a paradox; however, it illustrates the importance of the Aristotelian tradition in the comprehension and decoding of different syllogisms. Another important point is Giorgos’ support for Syriza and the Prespa Agreement. During our private conversations we referred to his political views and had the opportunity to clarify his political identity. Giorgos criticized SYRIZA’s politics on the issue from a left-wing – as he calls it – perspective. Specifically, he told us: (17) Generally speaking, I do not support Syriza. Modifying the constitution and the national identity of a state implies that you are an imperialistic force. This is not left-wing politics. However, that’s the only feasible political perspective right now.

He further adds: (18) Just think about that: During the so-called era of Memoranda it was implied [by the EU] that Greece would have to make [a series of ] constitutional changes in order to make the implementation of the new laws more permanent. And back then, all of us protested against this perspective, and rightly so. Now it is Greece that forces another country to change its national identity and name.

Our discussant explicates that he does not support Syriza, although he enthusiastically stands for the Prespa Agreement. He considers himself a leftist and criticizes Syriza for imperialistic politics due to the Prespa Agreement. He utilizes a parallelism between powerful and weak nation-states by presenting Greece as an imperialistic power that imposes constitutional changes on Northern Macedonia, just like the EU imposed the Memoranda on Greece. Giorgos’ references to Macedonian national identity are also an important point here, insofar as they reveal his distaste for Greek nationalism and national identity. At the same time, Giorgos defends Macedonians’ right to construct their national identity and accuses Syriza of imperialistic politics in contrast to all those who oppose the Agreement and Syriza’s diplomatic operations through the threat of FYROM’s irredentism. After the Greek national elections of 2019, he pinpoints the difference in the political scene. As he explicates:

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(19) I think it is annoying and very predictable, the stance that is ND’s political turn. After having used nationalists such as Samaras, now ND’s government leaves them aside and moves towards a more realistic way of doing politics [i.e., related to the Macedonian issue]. New Democracy has committed to a total transformation of the Prespa Agreement after the elections.

Once again, Giorgos signifies New Democracy’s fake patriotism and its hypocritical opposition to the Prespa Agreement. Maria and Giorgos, although they developed oppositional views on the Macedonian conflict, both agreed on one point – New Democracy’s fake patriotism and its political strategy to deny the Agreement. Through this presentation of brief extracts, we have attempted to show our methodological scope and how the synthesis of digital ethnographic approaches and critical discourse studies can lead to an in-depth analysis of the Macedonian issue and how this was discussed on social media.

Concluding remarks: Ethnic Nationalism vs Patriotism In sum, the aim of this chapter was to reveal the complexity of Greek national identity formation as it takes place on social media and is shaped via the debate on the Prespa Agreement and the Macedonian question. The analysis of two political figures’ – Antonis Samaras and Kyriakos Mitsotakis – Facebook comments on the Prespa Agreement and Syriza’s government illustrated the conservative party’s political strategy to oppose the Agreement on the basis of FYROM’s irredentism and through an appeal to patriotic emotions. Our decision to proceed to a second step of Facebook discourse analysis by employing ethnographic approaches transcends the weaknesses of the studies of official discourses on nationalism and the danger of vague and oversimplified explanations of national identity constructions on social media platforms. The synthesis of multi-sited ethnography and the DHA to CDS has illustrated the complex historical, social, cultural, and political processes of ethnic nationalism and enabled us to explain contextual issues that determine bottom-up discourses’ production and distribution on Facebook. In particular, multi-sited ethnography and ‘following’ strategies provided us with insights into ethnographic details regarding our participants, the political orientation and positioning of ordinary voices that, on the whole, shape bottomup discourses in new techno-discursive environments and illustrate the impact of social media in the public sphere, and especially the propagation of political discourse. In this sense, such an interdisciplinary approach helped us to scrutinize how people with different political views (re)construct their political and national identities, reflect on and criticise political issues and dominant political discourses in times of crisis through a digital public sphere. Integrating such method-

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ological insights, CDS scholars could better operate on the micro-level of social media platforms by establishing their critical stance on a more solid basis. Some of our findings on the content of the discourses analyzed are adumbrated in the following lines. Expressing an accepted Greek nationalistic view, former PM Samaras declared: “There is only one Macedonia and it is Greek.” As we saw in Section 2, this statement echoes a dominant view (endoxon) circulating in the Greek public sphere while structuring the relevant national debate. It is this very endoxical premise that is being underpinned or contested by the Facebook users we followed in this study in their attempts to shape their identities. In response to our question of whether she felt Macedonian as a Greek, Maria replied unequivocally that she was Greek and added that Macedonians are also Greeks. Maria’s statement is not relevant to an identity crisis; it reveals that, even unconsciously, Greek society concedes the existence of ethnic groups and underlines the intricate relation between the Greek Self and its ethnic Other. At the antipodes, Giorgos accepts, from the very beginning, FYROM’s right to the name ‘Macedonia’ by bringing to the fore the international debate on the Macedonian issue. In this sense, he opposes nationalistic discourses constructing an inclusive antinationalistic Us against a nationalistic Other. However, it is worth mentioning that despite their different positioning on the issue, the two Facebook users converge while employing, in many cases, the same (fallacious) argumentative strategies in order to sustain their discourses and identities (see for instance the topos of Syriza’s electoral failure), providing us with evidence for the problematic/ fallacious way in which the relevant debate has developed in the Greek public sphere, all the while giving rise to a highly polarized context. It is in contexts like the one revealed by the debate on the Macedonian issue in Greece where critical discourse-analytical approaches should expand their methodological and analytical tools in order to strengthen their descent into nationalism and the social inequalities that these phenomena may (re)produce. To this end, the present study emphasised top-down and bottom-up online interactions that illustrate the discursive diversity of social media and highlight how Facebook-polymedium discourses develop new challenges for CDS.

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Unpacking disinformation as social media discourse Johan Farkas & Yiping Xia

Malmö University | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

In this chapter, we examine the role of Discourse Studies in social media disinformation research. While currently underrepresented, Discourse Studies can provide key insights into why disinformation gains traction through credibility building, tapping into existing political narratives and stereotypes. Discourse Studies, we argue, can also bring much-needed attention to the constitutive role of antagonism in disinformation and to the connection between political practices, power relations and platform designs; aspects that are often overlooked. Drawing on three empirical cases – revolving around the Russian Internet Research Agency, fake Muslim Facebook pages and far-right conspiracy theories disguised as tabloid news – the chapter aims to provide a clearer view of the application of Discourse Studies (in its various forms) to disinformation.

Introduction Disinformation on social media has in recent years become a prominent area of both democratic concern and social scientific attention, highlighted by scholars as “the defining political communication topic of our time” (Freelon and Wells 2020: 145, original emphasis). The issue rose to prominence following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, when it was revealed that social media was used for foreign interference as well as new forms of micro-targeted advertisements. In relation to the former, a Russian organization with ties to the Kremlin, known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA), operated thousands of fake accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms. In terms of the latter, a BritishAmerican company, Cambridge Analytica, used personal data on millions of Americans – obtained without consent – to target voters on behalf of the Trump campaign. This company has since been accused of collaborating with the IRA (Palma 2018; Wylie 2019). These revelations coincided with the rise of “fake news” as a near-ubiquitous signifier in political debates – used by journalists and scholhttps://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.100.06far © 2023 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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ars to describe falsehoods in newslike packaging (Tandoc, Lim, and Ling 2018) and by political actors to attack and delegitimise perceived political opponents (Farkas and Schou 2018; Habgood-Coote 2018). In the wake of these developments, research on online disinformation has grown considerably in the past years, with scholars from a variety of disciplines taking on the topic from different methodological and theoretical perspectives. This has offered new insights into deception strategies, aims, and the sociotechnical dissemination of disinformation in different political landscapes and hybrid media systems. This chapter aims to highlight and discuss one particular research approach to disinformation, namely Discourse Studies. Despite remaining underrepresented in disinformation research, Discourse Studies holds potential for providing new insights into crucial aspects of political manipulation on social media. In this chapter we will first argue that, ontologically, Discourse Studies is relevant to the move beyond a narrow preoccupation with binary characterisations of content, notably the distinctions between true and false, real and fake, or bot and human. By emphasising the semiotic and historical contingency of knowledge, social identities, and political struggle, Discourse Studies (in its various forms) emphasises the entanglement of empirical phenomena and broader political contexts. This makes it well suited for studying social media disinformation as an interconnected web: a discursive ensemble built upon the construction and mobilisation of social identities and the amplification of political antagonism, rather than just collections of truths, half-truths, and falsehoods. Our second main argument is that Discourse Studies helps us to attend to the technodiscursive dynamics of social media disinformation, i.e., the interplay between social, political, and technological relations (Khosravinik 2017, 2018, 2020; Unger, Wodak, and KhosraviNik 2016). As we will explicate later, disinformation scholarship can benefit from such an engagement with Discourse Studies, approaching cases as discursive constructs arising from the entanglement of norms, practices, power relations, and platform designs. A key aim of disinformation is to amplify political contestation, discord, fear, and tension between social groups (Benkler, Faris, and Roberts 2018; Marwick and Lewis 2017). This is often done by building credibility within target demographics, for example through a “performance of authenticity” (Xia et al. 2019: 1653) via fake personas on social media platforms. Despite the significance of (perceived) credibility, authenticity, and antagonism, little research so far has provided in-depth, contextual analyses of these aspects. Indeed, researchers have tended to apply a more or less decontextualised focus to digital content, treating it primarily as a binary issue of true/false or fake/real (Phillips 2020). As we will unpack, this has limited the field.

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The political and socio-technical contexts of disinformation campaigns are crucial to their workings. We argue that Discourse Studies can make important contributions in this regard. This is not least due to the long-standing emphasis in this tradition on the semiotic “constitution of social identities and social relations” (Jorgensen and Phillips 2002: 9) and “discursive construction of politicoideological frontiers and the dichotomisation of social spaces” (Laclau 2000: xi). Discourse studies provides a relational and politico-semiotic approach to social phenomena, bringing questions of identity and antagonism to the forefront as well as connections to wider “socio political and structural context[s]” (Unger, Wodak, and KhosraviNik 2016: 279). In relation to disinformation, this means addressing vital questions such as: How do fearmongering narratives resonate with or build on existing political discourses? How is “the fabric and ingredients of the content … strategically designed” (KhosraviNik 2020) on social media? And how do social media platforms play a role in (co-)shaping political struggles and manipulation? Drawing on findings from three case studies, the chapter aims to discuss the strengths and contribution of Discourse Studies in the context of disinformation. The studied cases span the years 2015 to 2017 and focus – in terms of geography – on the United States and Denmark and – in terms of platforms – on Twitter and Facebook. These revolve around: 1.

Fake Muslim Facebook pages in Denmark, sparking thousands of hateful and racist reactions from users by claiming to represent “Muslims” in Denmark taking part in a widespread conspiracy to kill and rape “Danes” (Farkas, Schou, and Neumayer 2018) 2. “Jenna Abrams”, an influential fake Twitter account operated by the Russian IRA, claiming to represent a female, conservative U.S. citizen who decried liberal political figures in language appealing to a conservative community (Xia et al. 2019) 3. Letters to the editor posted on the website of the largest Danish tabloid newspaper, created without editorial supervision by far-right activists to spread racist conspiracy theories disguised as tabloid news on social media (Farkas and Neumayer 2020) In the following sections, we will first review key literature on online disinformation and Discourse Studies, before turning to the three cases.1 By reflecting on the role of Discourse Studies in relation to each case, our aim is to highlight the overall merits of this tradition within disinformation research. 1. Longer and detailed versions of these case studies have been published in the journals Critical Discourse Studies, Information, Communication, and Society, and Nordicom Review.

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Disinformation on social media Disinformation on social media is a growing interdisciplinary research area, studied by scholars from an array of fields, including political science (Golovchenko, Hartmann, and Adler-Nissen 2018), psychology (Lewandowsky, Ecker, and Cook 2017), linguistics (see Block 2019), philosophy (Rini 2017), and media and communication studies (Freelon and Wells 2020; Marwick and Lewis 2017). While political manipulation is certainly not new (Ellul 1965), the rise of digital platforms has sparked increased attention to new forms of deception. While terminology varies across disciplines and studies, definitions of disinformation are generally predicated on an intentionality to deceive or mislead. For example, Jack (2017: 3) defines it as “information that is deliberately false or misleading”. Similarly, the “High Level Expert Group on Fake News and Online Disinformation of the European Commission” defines it as “false, inaccurate, or misleading information designed, presented and promoted to intentionally cause public harm or for profit” (European Commission 2018: 10). These definitions also encompass what has been described as fake news: “viral posts based on fictitious accounts made to look like news reports” (Tandoc et al. 2018: 138). Increasingly, however, scholars have encouraged peers to move “beyond fake news” (Freelon and Wells 2020: 146) due to the term’s ambiguity and increasing politicization (Habgood-Coote 2018; Farkas and Schou 2018). Although the concept of disinformation is useful for empirical analysis, its usage comes with the risk of over-accentuating binary emphases on true versus false, intentional versus unintentional. As Phillips (2020) notes, research on disinformation often limits “discussions to the basic assertion that a particular story is false, rather than encouraging reflection on why the story resonates with audiences” (56, original emphasis). Disinformation campaigns are complex political, cultural, and sociotechnical phenomena that rely on a mix of different types of content, platforms, and sources. Here, binary analyses of true versus false, intentional versus unintentional fall short, as they fail to explain why certain narratives gain traction in specific contexts, while others do not. Understanding this requires in-depth examinations of wider discourses and social identities. Since the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, research on disinformation on social media has surged (Freelon and Wells 2020). Scholars have argued that “context collapse” (boyd 2010) and the lack of information gatekeepers on social media propels users to rely more on cultural signifiers – in particular those that speak to their identities – when evaluating messages (Marwick 2018; Tripodi 2018). Political actors have seized on these openings in social media spaces, clinging onto the exploitation of partisan polarization (Faris et al. 2017;

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Xia et al. 2019) and racial identity (Daniels 2009), among other deep-rooted cultural mindsets. Among online disinformation campaigns, Russia’s IRA has garnered the most political and scholarly attention. This campaign spanned multiple countries and all major social media platforms in Europe and the U.S., including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit (DiResta et al. 2018; Lukito 2019). On Twitter, researchers have identified thousands of fake accounts targeting U.S. citizens, impersonating, among others, left-wing users, right-wing users, Black Lives Matter activists, and local news outlets (Freelon and Lokot 2020; Linvill and Warren 2019; Bastos and Farkas 2019). In doing so, this campaign clearly intended to captivate U.S. users via identity-conforming messages, tailor-made with a sense of constructed authenticity (Xia et al. 2019). Beyond the IRA, cases of disinformation similarly revolve around manipulation of sociocultural identities and feigned authenticity. For example, Daniels (2009) has shown how white supremacists use “cloaked websites” to project cultural legitimacy. Marwick and Lewis (2017) have shown how media manipulators exploit online participatory culture to push racism and misogyny towards mainstream audiences. Scholars of online trolling and harassment have argued that ambivalent identities in Internet culture undergird such aggression (Phillips and Milner 2017). Despite disinformation campaigns being deeply context-dependent, the dominant research paradigm has emphasised binary distinctions between true and false with little emphasis on context. As Hedrick, Kreiss, and Karpf (2018) critically note, research has largely “occurred in a vacuum, often ignoring the deeper political, social, and cultural contexts from which they have emerged” (1059). In such scholarship, disinformation has been treated as an amalgam of decontextualized texts, analysed with the aim of classifying messages according to their truthfulness or likelihood of deriving from bots. Researchers have also used disinformation messages as independent variables to measure their – usually shortterm – effect on user beliefs and behaviours (e.g., Bail et al. 2020). As argued by Marwick (2018), such studies shed much-needed light on disinformation, yet ultimately risk falling short of thoroughly understanding it. This is due to the tendency to see disinformation as a “magic bullet”, thus “disregarding the structural influence of problematic patterns in media messaging and representation” (Marwick 2018: 485). Marwick further points out that researchers, for this reason, “may underestimate the engagement that people have with problematic or ideologically-driven information online” (487). Emphasis on true/false dichotomies risks trading in-depth research for a simplistic remedy: to save democracy, just eliminate falsehoods. This can legitimise anti-democratic solutions, such as state censorship (Lim 2020; Farkas and

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Schou 2019). Much of current disinformation research stops short at the point of mapping the ostensible features and scales of falsehoods. Even studies that “debunk” the power of “fake news” and propaganda (e.g., Bail et al. 2020; Guess et al. 2020) assume that fake or inauthentic content itself is of most concern. This outlook neglects the ambivalent dynamics surrounding people’s exposure to online manipulation, chiefly shaped by social identities and political discourses. As Daniel Kreiss suggests, Our field has been woefully inadequate at addressing the communicative aspects of social identity. Even more, we have largely ignored the ways that identity shapes epistemology – that social identities come prior to what people evaluate as true or false. (Kreiss 2019b)

Research into the mutual shaping of social identities, epistemologies, and meaning-making requires contextual and sociopolitical perspectives, something often lacking in current scholarship. While no theoretical or methodological framework can do a catch-all job, we argue that Discourse Studies is well-suited for addressing key aspects of such an endeavour. This includes studying how social identities, antagonism, and political struggles are mobilised in disinformation campaigns. Instead of viewing disinformation messages as “magic bullets” wreaking havoc on democratic societies, Discourse Studies takes full account of connections to wider narratives, political struggles, and social identities. Discourse Studies also rejects binary notions of true and false, emphasising the underlying power relations of all meaning-making. In the following section, we will discuss the application of Discourse Studies in the context of social media, before turning to our three case studies.

Discourse studies and social media Discourse Studies encompasses a number of overlapping research schools that share an overarching commitment to the “semiotic dimensions of power, injustice, and political economic, social or cultural change in society” (Unger et al. 2016: 278). They also share a number of fundamental premises: knowledge is historically contingent, political struggles and power relations shape meaningmaking, and social identities are relationally constituted (Laclau 2014; Wodak 2009; Potter 1996; Krzyżanowski and Forchtner 2016). Beyond this shared foundation, different schools have “different theoretical models, research methods and agenda” (Fairclough, Mulderrig and Wodak 2011: 394). Two important schools of Discourse Studies are Critical Discourse Analysis, associated with Fairclough (1995) and Wodak (2009), and The Essex School of Discourse Theory, associated

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with Laclau and Mouffe (2014). While they diverge in some key areas, they also share many similarities. As noted by Torfing (2005): “when it comes to the actual analysis of social and political discourse, the differences between Fairclough and Laclau and Mouffe are small” (9). In this chapter, we will emphasise the shared premises and similarities across Discourse Studies and discuss the merits of this tradition overall in the context of disinformation and social media. As will become clear through the discussed case studies, our own research has drawn respectively on Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1995, 2003) and the Essex School of Discourse Theory (Laclau and Mouffe 2014; Laclau 2014). This has led us down similar paths, examining the discursive construction of credibility, trust, and authenticity in disinformation campaigns as well as the constitutive role of antagonism. As such, our aim is to illuminate our shared paths and reflect on the overall strengths of Discourse Studies. Discourse Studies has a long history in media scholarship, especially in research on media’s role in shaping knowledge, power relations, and political struggles (Hall 1982; van Dijk 1985; Fairclough 1995; Wodak 2009; Wodak and Meyer 2016). As Stuart Hall argued in 1982, media systems play a crucial role in meaning-making due to the ways in which they “selectively circulate … preferred meanings and interpretations” (Hall 1982: 341, original emphasis). Media institutions help us “not simply to know more about ‘the world’ but to make sense of it. Here the line … between the ‘meaningless’ and the ‘meaningful,’ between the incorporated practices, meanings and values and the oppositional ones, is ceaselessly drawn and redrawn” (Hall 1982: 341). While media systems have changed considerably since Hall’s (1982) seminal work, media institutions and technologies still play a crucial role in shaping knowledge, power, and identity boundaries – all of which are subject to political struggles and deliberate attempts at manipulation. Many social practices and struggles over signification have in recent years moved to the realm of social media. Here, a few platforms have grown increasingly hegemonic, most notably U.S.-based Meta (controlling Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) and Chinese-based Tencent (controlling Tencent QQ, WeChat, and more). These platforms are reshaping diverse aspects of human life, including news consumption, political deliberation, and everyday sociality (van Dijck 2013). Researchers within Discourse Studies have increasingly examined social media communication. Most prominently, KhosraviNik (2017, 2020) has developed an approach dubbed Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS), building on Fairclough and Wodak (1997) and integrating the digital dynamics of discursive production and consumption on social media. This approach emphasises attentiveness to the socio-technical characteristics of digital platforms,

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including interactivity, intertextuality, and multimodality, as these play key roles in shaping online discourse (KhosraviNik 2017, 2018, 2020). Social media platforms revolve around “techno-discursive design” (KhosraviNik 2018: 440), facilitating the interplay between digital and social practices. Functions such as the “like” button as well as the algorithmic dissemination of content not only enable communication, but are also part of discursive dynamics (KhosraviNik 2017, 2018, 2020). A key aspect of social media’s techno-discursive design is the ability to create personal accounts, including fake personas. Social media revolve around decentralised content production, meaning that news, videos, or stories can derive from a near-endless number of sources that can be difficult to verify. Powerful and resource-rich actors take advantage of this by manipulating audiences on a wide scale, for example in cases of state-backed propaganda agencies deploying thousands of fake accounts. This poses key challenges for researchers and journalists aiming to critically examine political discourses online. On social media, boundaries between actors and discursive practices are often difficult to pin down (Farkas, Schou, and Neumayer 2018). It is often challenging to trace the origins of narratives, sources, and underlying intentions (Phillips and Milner 2017). At the same time, as highlighted by Krzyżanowski and Ledin (2017), “social media has fostered the rise of various agorae of exchanges of views which often escape the traditional norms of political expression by progressively ‘testing’ as well as ‘stretching’ norms of publicly-acceptable language” (567). This has given rise to borderline discourse (Krzyżanowski and Ledin 2017), the deliberate blurring of boundaries between civil and uncivil discourse. Researchers from Discourse Studies have emphasised the importance of examining the techno-discursive design and layered nature of social media communication (KhosraviNik 2017). On social media, communication encompasses “not only what is said, but also specific information about the profile of the user sending out a message, the users receiving that message, [and] about how users interact with a message” (Langlois and Elmer 2013: 2). A platform like Facebook is not simply a neutral or transparent conveyor of “text”, but a “sociotechnical ensemble[s] whose components can hardly be told apart” (van Dijck 2013, 14). Despite this, much social media research has tended to focus only on content, as KhosraviNik (2020) summarises: In practice, a large body of studies on SMC [social media communication] are predominantly focused on the content … rather than dealing with how the participatory web may have changed the politics of discursive dynamics, the quality of the very content and the overall structure of discursive participation. (2)

Unpacking disinformation as social media discourse

Following KhosraviNik (2020), we argue that Discourse Studies must capture the complex interplay on social media between digital technologies, social practices, cultural identities, and hegemonic relations. This means capturing both the “socio-political context of users in society” (KhosraviNik 2017: 585) and how “diverse elements and actors (human and non-human, informational, communicational, and political) are mobilized and articulated in specific ways” (Langlois et al. 2009: 416–417). In this regard, The Essex School of Discourse Theory (also known as simply Discourse Theory) offers a powerful framework for studying relational constructions of social identities, political struggle, and “the dimension of antagonism that is inherent in human relations” (Mouffe 2000: 101). Through concepts such as hegemony, sedimentation, reactivation, nodal points, and logics of difference and equivalence, discourse theory provides a vocabulary that draws attention to the political struggles and power relations behind meaning-making (Laclau and Mouffe 2014; Laclau 2014). Within the context of disinformation, this framework enables us to study the discursive construction of both credibility and political antagonism. As we will outline in the following sections through three case studies, Discourse Studies – both in the tradition of Critical Discourse Analysis and Discourse Theory – can serve as a productive approach for studying disinformation. Such research is particularly adept for examining the creation of (perceived) credibility, trust, and authenticity, as well as the amplification of political antagonism, all of which are key to disinformation despite remaining under-researched. The aim of the following is thus to exemplify how Discourse Studies can be mobilised empirically and to reflect on the merits of such an endeavour.

Fake Muslim Facebook pages and discourse theory In 2015, a number of fake personas on Facebook managed to attract thousands of angry and racist comments from Danish Facebook users by claiming to represent Muslims living in Denmark. Supposedly, these Muslims were part of a grand conspiracy to take over the country, raping and killing (white, Christian) Danes in the process (Farkas, Schou, and Neumayer 2018). By (crudely) constructing fake Muslim identities through a tapestry of images, videos, texts, and hyperlinks, anonymous culprits spread well-known far-right conspiracy theories about Muslims and immigrants in a disguised form: I am a proud Muslim. Denmark will be a Muslim country because it is Allah’s will. We are the ones who laugh while we take your money, women and houses. :)

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Our case study(“About” section of Mohammed El-Sayed, Facebook, 1 July 2015) focused on 11 fake Muslim Facebook pages that attracted more than 20,000 comments, many of which expressed hatred towards both the individual (fake) identities as well as Muslims in general. A member of the Danish parliament even shared one of the pages, seemingly believing in the credibility of the source. In order to understand this spectacle of deception and hostility, we examined both the (crude) construction of fake identities on these pages and the antagonism created through dichotomous narratives of “Muslims” versus “Danes.” To do so, our study relied on Discourse Studies, specifically the theoretical vocabulary of the Essex School of Discourse Theory (Laclau 2014; Laclau and Mouffe 2014). The first step of our analysis examined the discursive construction of both individual and collective Muslim identities on the Facebook pages. On social media, individual identities are established and reproduced through the continuous curation of images, texts, and videos (Hogan 2010) as well as interactions with (other) users. On the fake pages, this curation involved the appropriation of Arabic names, profile pictures, images from protests (for example against the Danish Mohammed cartoons), common Arabic phrases (e.g., ‘Mashallah’), “Islamist” symbolism (such as the so-called Black Standard), and hyperlinks to existing panIslamic political organizations (Farkas, Schou, and Neumayer 2018). In order to establish that these individual identities were indeed false, we analysed patterns across multiple pages, highlighting the cyclical use of made-up Arabic names, narratives, images, and affiliations. Through discourse theory, our analysis focused on how the fake personas constructed authenticity and sparked user reactions by tapping into existing fear, xenophobia, and antagonism in Denmark (Hervik 2011). By constructing fake identities whose entire meaning derived from an oppositional relationship to “the Dane”, these Facebook pages projected a common fearmongering narrative of “us” versus “them” found in European far-right politics – what has been characterised as a “politics of fear” (Wodak 2015, 186). When studying the comment sections of the Facebook pages, we found a large number of users reproducing the dichotomous identities of “the Muslim” and “the Dane”, expressing general hatred towards Muslims and immigrants (often used interchangeably). We thus found that users seemingly accepted not only the credibility of the individual fake personas, but also a larger narrative of Muslims being dichotomous adversaries of Danes. In turn, these user responses became part of the continued performance of authenticity of the (fake) Muslim identities, as the comment sections “supported” or “confirmed” both their credibility and antagonism. The anonymous administrators of the Facebook pages exacerbated the role of user comments by systematically removing comments expressing that the pages

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were fake. The possibility cannot be excluded that the anonymous administrators also contributed with comments of their own to bolster the dichotomous narrative of “Muslims” versus “Danes”. Considering these aspects, it is clear that Facebook’s techno-discursive design played a key role in shaping both deception and antagonism, enabling the construction of fake identities, the anonymity of content creators, and the selective removal of comments. By approaching cases of fake identities from a discourse theoretical perspective, we get an in-depth understanding of the construction of credibility around fake personas as well as the political discourses they amplify and hateful reactions they receive. Building directly on existing stereotypes and fearmongering narratives in Denmark (Hervik 2011), fake personas managed to spark outrage from Facebook users, amplifying existing xenophobia and racism. The analysis shows how manipulation and antagonism can arise from the interplay between (fake) identities, existing discourses, user practices and what can be described as a “hijacking” of “social media sites’ technical infrastructure” (MatamorosFernández 2017: 935). Instead of applying a binary view to disinformation centred solely on deciphering what is true and what is false, this study focused on questions of how and why disinformation operates on a techno-discursive level. Through a discourse theoretical approach, questions of identity, power, and political struggle were brought to the fore.

Fake Twitter discourse and critical discourse analysis: Jenna Abrams With more than 70,000 followers, “Jenna Abrams” (@Jenn_Abrams) was the second most followed English-speaking account from the Russian IRA by the time Twitter suspended IRA-related accounts in 2017. This account impersonated a conservative, white, female U.S. citizen who was highly expressive about political issues and general interest topics. Her tweets managed to stir up online debates about divisive political issues and appeared in over 30 media outlets, including The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and CNN (Collins and Cox 2017). Our initial research interest in this “sockpuppet” account stemmed from reading a specific tweet: “Use #AskJennaAbrams tag or email to ask me your questions I’ll answer on Sunday on https://t.co/XGTOAyM8rS”. Knowing that a Russian team operated “Jenna Abrams”, we were surprised by the effort put into interacting with followers, as well as her seemingly large and committed following – enough to hold a Q&A session. Further investigation only brought up more unexpected facts: the Q&A session was not a one-off but was announced at least three times in her Twitter feed; the URL mentioned in the above tweet directed users to a WordPress blog that also belonged to “Jenna Abrams”. Pursuing the blog

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would lead the reader to “Jenna’s” profiles on other platforms, including Telegram, Medium, and an email address. That the IRA campaign went beyond Twitter and operated across platforms has since been studied by other researchers (DiResta et al. 2018; Lukito 2019) – attesting to the intertextuality and complexity of the operation. By applying Discourse Studies – in this case Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1995, 2003) – to Jenna Abrams’ messages on Twitter and beyond, we were able to shed light on the “intertextuality among textual practices on (potentially) multi-sites” (KhosraviNik 2017: 585). What we see in Jenna Abrams’s case is a calculated campaign to exploit social media self-branding – establishing a female, white, conservative persona spanning a handful of platforms – for the purpose of optimising a performance of personal authenticity. Here, critical discourse analysis enabled us to unpack this performative manipulation through the lens of multimodality and technodiscursivity. Specifically, the Abrams account took full advantage of Twitter’s affordances, including a profile photo, header banner, personal bio and more to build authenticity. Using a picture of a young, white woman as her profile photo, which turned out to be of a 26-year-old Russian woman (O’Sullivan 2017), Abrams wrote in her bio that she lived in “the USA”. The bio also claimed that she was “pro-common sense”, an implicit attack on liberals who she often denounced as “hypocritical” and “lacking common sense”. Moreover, Twitter’s features such as “@ reply” and hashtags were often used to boost the account’s visibility. Specifically, in the early stages of the operation, Jenna Abrams frequently “@ replied” to prominent political figures and mainstream media outlets and used trending political hashtags such as #ISIS – both tactics useful for relatively unknown accounts to gain followers. Together, Abrams’s multimodal operation exploited the digital architecture of Twitter in building credibility and amplifying discord among the U.S. public. As the previous example of Q&As vividly shows, interactivity lies at the heart of such an operation. The Abrams account often signalled to followers her love for American democracy and popular culture, and maintained a conversational, light-hearted style in her interactions. For example, she once tweeted about her attachment to the U.S., her “home country”, saying: “I am afraid that one day incompetent and greedy politicians will ruin the #US, our home! #WhatAreYouAfraidOf.” She also commented on American celebrities to demonstrate her authenticity as an American and spark user interactions. Such techniques of “authentic” self-expression are no secret for social media strategists and wellstudied by Internet scholars (Marwick and boyd, 2011), but the importance of performed authenticity in disinformation practices has just begun to be noticed by scholars.

Unpacking disinformation as social media discourse

Abrams’s authenticity work would have been pointless but for the IRA’s second set of tactics, embracing familiar conservative narratives and discourses. Let us return to the wider political context – we now know that the goal of the IRA campaign was to “sow discord among the American public” (Grand Jury for the District of Columbia 2018). To this end, the IRA deployed a host of Twitter accounts – Jenna Abrams included – impersonating American conservative users and participating in political discourse on Twitter, while at the same time setting up liberal-leaning accounts to contribute with polarising counter-narratives, notably through accounts that avowedly supported the Black Lives Matter movement (Freelon et al. 2020). The chief task for the Jenna Abrams account, then, was to establish her credibility as a conservative in-group member. The account performed its competence in conservative culture by posting news or right-leaning commentaries on contentious issues, repeatedly loathing liberals’ “hypocrisy” and “lack of common sense”, engaging in conservative insider lingo that mocked and attacked discourses of the American left. For instance, one of the repeated themes was hatred towards then-President Barack Obama. Two tweets exemplify this effort: Have a good Tuesday, my friends and remember that it’s 416 days till Obama leaves the Office. It’s almost 8 years of Obama and people don’t know which bathroom to use.

Other political topics of interest to the Abrams account included the Black Lives Matter movement, feminism, and refugee policies. Her commentary on these divisive issues served to evoke a partisan identity (in this case, that of conservatives) that deeply shapes how Americans view politics and the world today (Kreiss 2019a). The case of Jenna Abrams demonstrated that calculated identity work on social media platforms, when astutely designed to fit into the technical infrastructure, can generate credibility that serves political manipulation. Applying Critical Discourse Analysis to the Jenna Abrams case allowed us to pay detailed attention to the role of intertextuality, multimodality, interactivity, and bringing in wider political contexts, in order to unpack the work of this prominent fake identity.

Fake letters to the editor on ‘Folkets Røst’ Our last case of disinformation, studied through Discourse Studies, is The People’s Voice (‘Folkets Røst’) – a digital platform run by the Danish tabloid newspaper Ekstra Bladet from 2010 to 2018 (Farkas and Neumayer 2020). Our study found that prominent far-right activists in Denmark systematically used The Peo-

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ple’s Voice to disseminate xenophobic narratives and conspiracy theories, disguised as tabloid news. The 50 most visible letters on social media from The People’s Voice were shared more than 120,000 times on Facebook, including by leading members of the Danish parliament who clearly mistook the letters for professional news articles. Drawing on the Essex School of Discourse Theory (Laclau and Mouffe 2014; Dahlberg and Phelan 2011), our analysis examined the construction of legitimacy and credibility on The People’s Voice as well as how far-right activists used the letters to manipulate users and spread xenophobic antagonism. Visually, content on The People’s Voice was close to indistinguishable from articles from Ekstra Bladet’s newsroom, having the same overall visual presentation of content. Additionally, when shared on social media, users could only see the source as being “ekstrabladet.dk” – the top-level domain of the well-known tabloid – making the source identical to professional articles from the media outlet. Prominent farright activists exploited these visual ambiguities and similarities by systematically creating letters to the editor mimicking the tabloid journalistic genre with clickbait headlines, third-person writing, hyperlinks, images, and references to their own work as “articles”. By blurring the already opaque boundaries between usergenerated content and tabloid news, these actors successfully managed to disseminate fear-mongering and racist discourses about immigrants and Muslims in a manipulative newslike packaging, supported by an established newspaper driven by a click-for-profit incentive. The letters contained a carefully constructed mix of cherry-picked, manipulated, and false information, promoting well-known far-right conspiracy theories about Muslims, immigrants, and “liberal elites.” This was done through headlines, such as “German Newspaper: Merkel Will Use the Refugee Crisis to Create the United States of Europe”, “The Terrorists are Pouring over the Borders”, and “The UN and Goldman-Sachs: The EU Must be Destroyed for Capital Gain”. Through discourse theory, we examined both the construction of these antagonistic narratives – building on existing tropes, stereotypes, and conspiracy theories – and the use of Ekstra Bladet’s digital architecture to construct credibility. Drawing on Krzyżanowski and Ledin (2017), we argue that the letters to the editor represent systematic attempts to disseminate “borderline discourse” in the form of uncivil narratives packaged in a civil guise. While the narratives on The People’s Voice were identical to those on far-right blogs and websites, their packaging as tabloid news produced a veil of credibility and journalistic authority. The letters can thus be seen as part of a larger development, where far-right discourses have increasingly become “spread and effectively ‘normalised’ … online” (Krzyżanowski and Ledin 2017: 577).

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Through the theoretical vocabulary of The Essex School of Discourse Theory, we unpacked how these letters do not simply constitute cases of “false information” or “fake news”. Instead, these letters revolve around systematically blurring boundaries between societal truths and falsehoods, journalism and usergenerated content, news and opinion, as well as civil and uncivil discourse, all supported by the infrastructure of both Ekstra Bladet and social media platforms. By exploiting the ambivalence of the techno-discursive design of The People’s Voice, the studied letters amplify existing fearmongering discourses and conspiracy theories, prevalent in Denmark and beyond. This highlights the interplay between platform design and political discourses.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have argued how Discourse Studies (in its various forms) offers a powerful framework for providing new, critical, and contextual understandings of disinformation on social media, moving beyond a preoccupation solely with the falseness of content. This approach emphasises the contingency of knowledge and relational constitution of social identities, enabling in-depth examinations of how and why disinformation campaigns construct and amplify political narratives and identities and play into wider discourses. We have further argued that Discourse Studies is capable of unpacking the techno-discursive dynamics of social media (KhosraviNik 2018): how platforms facilitate the tactical construction of credibility and authenticity, as well as the role of antagonism in disinformation campaigns. The three cases described in this chapter all revolve around the construction of credibility and authenticity to spread fearmongering and polarising political messages. Existing research shows that these aspects lie at the heart of most disinformation campaigns (Marwick and Lewis 2017; Daniels 2009), though they have not received adequate attention in disinformation scholarship (Hedrick, Kreiss, and Karpf 2018). While our cases differ in terms of geo-political contexts and platforms, they all touch on the tactical blurring of boundaries: between authenticity and inauthenticity, visibility and anonymity, civility and incivility, credibility and deceitfulness – all enabled by the techno-discursive design of specific platforms (Phillips and Milner 2017). It is exactly by navigating these techno-discursive boundaries that disinformation thrives, whether deriving from small groups of activists, as in the case of The People’s Voice, or from large-scale actors, as in the case of the IRA. Content analyses based on binary distinctions such as “fake news” versus “real news” can only go so far, their importance in motivating this field notwith-

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standing. Disinformation actors like the IRA rely on a complex interplay between discourses, identities, and technological affordances. These techno-discursive elements need to be accounted for in analyses of disinformation campaigns. This requires researchers to search beyond the characteristics of textual information alone, considering disinformation messages as organic narratives that portend to join with existing discourses and available media infrastructures. As noted in the introduction, Discourse Studies has so far remained underrepresented in scholarship on disinformation. This is a shame since this multifaceted research tradition is uniquely suited for unpacking questions of how disinformation resonates with citizens based on “already existing fears and doubts” (Farkas and Schou 2018: 309), all the while exploring “who sees what in what context, and how the internal structure of the message is influenced by the intended circulation” (KhosraviNik 2020). Future research could benefit from Discourse Studies on a range of central questions. This includes how disinformation campaigns construct credible identities on social media and how users relate to them; how questions of race, gender, class, and political struggle are mobilised; the role of borderline discourse (Krzyżanowski and Ledin 2017); and how the technical infrastructure of social media is tactically appropriated to manipulate and disseminate political narratives. Here, new approaches such as Social Media Critical Discourse Analysis (SM-CDS) hold key potential. Finally, Discourse Studies can also be mobilised to critically examine how the very definition of terms such as “fake news” are mobilised politically as part of hegemonic struggles (Farkas and Schou 2018). The tradition can also contribute to researching how the constructed threat of disinformation is used rhetorically to legitimise new forms of legislation, including censorship laws in authoritarian regimes (Lim 2020; Farkas and Schou 2019). Hopefully, future research will provide new insights into these important issues.

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Language typology as a discursive affordance in digital discourse The case of the “camouflaged German option” online Krzysztof E. Borowski

University of Kansas | University of Wisconsin-Madison

With the rapid development of participatory social media, these spaces have become new arenas for producing political discourse. However, critical analyses of digital discourse that examine the importance of language typological variation for the (re)production of political discourse are relatively new. This chapter investigates linguistic creativity in non-elite political communication by combining a critical discursive approach with language typology. The analysis highlights the importance of language typology in political communication as political actors exploit the typological affordances of Polish. This chapter demonstrates how language affordances are mobilised for political reasons to (re)produce discriminatory political messages. The chapter suggests combining critical discourse analysis and language typology to reveal novel perspectives on the intersection of language and politics on the Internet.

Introduction The advent of digitally-mediated forms of interaction and communication has led to the emergence of novel communicative affordances and meaning-making phenomena, changing how people use these resources. This process has also influenced online political discourses. Internet users soon found themselves in environments that provided them with novel possibilities for expressing and promoting their opinions. While the digital spaces of discursive practice have restricted the quality and quantity of contextual cues through context collapse (Androutsopoulos 2014; Marwick and boyd 2011; Tagg, Seargeant, and Brown 2017), they have also triggered creativity in finding complementary ways of expressing meaning.

https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.100.07bor © 2023 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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In this chapter, I engage with this idea by focusing on the intersection of participatory social media and language typology in the context of online political discussions. In so doing, I examine the “camouflaged German option” (CGO) discourse on the Western Daily (Pol. Dziennik Zachodni) discussion forum. I focus on how anonymous users magnify this initially offline discourse, exploiting the affordances granted by the intersection of language typology and participatory social media. Using contemporary data collected from online comments sections, I investigate examples of linguistic derivation and compounding in bottom-up political discourse. Moving recursively between the social media-politicslanguage triad, I theorise participatory digital media (including online discussion forums) as new sites of doing discursive politics. Assuming that language constitutes both the message and the medium, my analysis examines politically motivated linguistic creativity in the larger context of political activism on participatory social media. I demonstrate how anonymous users exploit the typological affordances of the Polish language to produce and promote their preferred, ideologised vision of the social world. I argue that language, as the main tool of constructing and expressing meaning in online discussion forums, becomes a discursive affordance on its own in digitally-mediated political communication. The salience of conversations in the Western Daily comments sections makes this space a fertile ground for studying linguistically-motivated discursive affordances. The discussions there allow for in-depth observation of how language facilitates social practices such as discrimination and stereotyping. Given the inextricable link between political and linguistic activity in this space, I investigate these issues in relation to one another. I also concentrate on micro-linguistic strategies of executing social action in the context of text-based participatory social media. Consequently, I trace the pervasiveness of the “camouflaged German option” (CGO) discourse as I analyse posts produced in the Western Daily comments sections from 2011 to 2016. In the analysis, I focus on the discursive strategy of nomination that facilitates the construction of social actors in language-in-use (Reisigl and Wodak 2016). As I examine various linguistic realisations of the CGO discourse, I demonstrate how the typological language properties of Polish facilitate the production, reproduction, and circulation of anti-Silesian narratives in digital media. Since critical discourse studies work needs to be problem-oriented and socially committed, I illuminate how non-elite political actors exploit typological language affordances to construct discriminatory discourses on the Internet. Traditionally, issues surrounding language typology in critical analyses of (digital) discourse are not at the forefront of critical discourse analytic studies. Nevertheless, they represent an exciting site for studying discursive phenomena from a novel perspective that more closely examines how micro-linguistic choices

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affect macro-social issues of identity, representation, and power. In this chapter, I investigate the micro-linguistic aspect by incorporating insights from a typological language perspective to explore its explanatory potential for the study of discourse construction, production, and dissemination. Since its inception, critical discourse studies has had its roots in analyses of Western (and predominantly English) language data. Consequently, applying Anglo-Western theoretical paradigms to local investigations of language-in-use has become one of the dominant trends in studies of non-English discursive practices. While this approach provided fertile ground for the development of the field in new settings, it also imported Anglo-Western sets of beliefs about language into non-Western sociocultural contexts. Prior research has shown that Anglocentric models of language-related behaviour do not necessarily hold for speakers of non-Western languages (Schiffrin 1984; Tannen and Kakava 1992; Wierzbicka 1976, 1985). Using linguistic data from a non-Anglo-Western context, I demonstrate how the typological characteristics of Polish should make us reconsider and, hopefully, broaden our idea of discursive affordance to include language as a tool of discourse production and circulation. My analysis is grounded in the Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SMCDS) approach that combines critical analysis of discourse with structural integration of both communicative and technological affordances in a social media communication paradigm, including its influence on discursive practices in the digital world (KhosraviNik 2018a). In the era of increased engagement with digitally-mediated texts, SM-CDS represents an attempt to continue working under the umbrella of critical discourse studies while seeking novel ways of theorising digital discursive practices that transgress traditional forms of discourse production, reception, and circulation. As a critical perspective on discourse, SMCDS is “not only interested in what happens in the media per se as a closed loop but also in how it may shape and influence the social and political sphere of our life worlds and vice versa” (KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018: 55). Within the SMCDS approach, conclusions about the nature of digital discourse should constitute a point of departure for wider contextualisations of discursive practices in the offline world (KhosraviNik 2018a). Following Gibson (1977), I understand affordances as “the ways in which the characteristics of a particular environment both constrain and enable particular kinds of activity” (Page 2018: 11).

Digital media and critical discourse studies The rapid development of digital technologies and changes in user behaviour from unilinear consumption to participatory production and consumption

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(Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010) have made researchers rethink previous approaches to critical analyses of digital discourse. This shift led to increased interest in how features of computer-mediated discourse facilitate local dynamics of language, identity performance, and social practice. No longer restricted to elite professionals, the emergence of new media altered the conditions of discourse production as decentralisation and multi-authorship became the dominant contexts. Consequently, there is less power behind discourse but more power in discourse, resulting in increased accessibility and a rise of influencers and bottom-up political activism (KhosraviNik 2014: 287–288). Thus, new technologies facilitate the construction of new identities, including the (re)negotiation of power relationships with other new media users (Jones 2005). Because technological affordances of digital spaces encourage people to engage in novel behaviours to determine what is (not) acceptable, their actions should be in focus (Blommaert 2019). The development of digitally-mediated discourse in new media has altered the face of political communication as digital affordances have transformed the nature of political discourse (KhosraviNik 2018b). Some researchers have suggested that participatory social media have the potential to revolutionise citizen participation in political communication. The ongoing expansion of CMC resulted in the organic emergence of “third spaces”, nonpolitical spaces where political discussions nevertheless unfold and proliferate (Wright 2017). Discussion forums and comments sections rank highly among prime examples of nonpolitical third spaces that visibly turned political. As a result, forum discussions became important spaces for producing online political discourse (Johansson, Kleinke, and Lehti 2017). Designed to facilitate the uninhibited expression of opinions, they have gradually become arenas of heated debates generating conflict discourse, verbal violence, and hate speech (Baider and Kopytowska 2017; Kopytowska, Grabowski, and Woźniak 2017; Woźniak and Kopytowska 2016). This process has also transformed societal ideas about what constitutes acceptable language in sociopolitical debates, increasing the visibility of political polarisation (Krzyżanowski and Ledin 2017). In response to the mass incorporation of digital media into political communication, new terminology emerged. For instance, Vaccari (2013: 4) coined the term “digital politics” to describe how individuals use the Internet for political engagement and how politicians take advantage of online affordances to produce such engagement. The mediatisation of politics through digital media provides non-elite actors with more opportunities to produce political coverage themselves, affecting the meaning of political communication (Chadwick 2011). Consequently, digital affordances challenge the privileged status of traditional political activity, resulting in novel forms of political engagement (Krzyżanowski and Tucker 2018). The same is true for polylogues, multi-participant interactions

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where “many-to-many” communicative contexts replace the traditional “one-toone” setting. Because polylogues allow for building coalitions and alliances (Bruxelles and Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2004), they provide fertile ground for studying digitally-mediated political discourse (Bou-Franch, Lorenzo-Dus, and Blitvich 2012).

From critical discourse studies to language typology As a Slavic language, Polish is typical of synthetic languages, one in which many morphemes (the smallest meaningful units) come together to express meaning (Comrie 1989). The most common ways of creating new words and meanings include suffixation, compounding, and prefixation (Rothstein 1993). In English, word order is the dominant way of conveying relationships in the sentence. Polish achieves the same goal with affixation, adding small chunks to the default word form as a means of expressing meaning. For instance, the Polish noun samosąd ‘lynch’ combines the units sam- ‘alone, on your own, by yourself ’ and -sąd ‘court’ using the infix -o-. Such affordance of synthetic languages like Polish is most apparent in nouns, commonly used to name, evaluate, and situate individuals in discourse. Prior research has shown that Polish speakers use names in political communication to construct “an ideologically preferred reality” (Galasiński and Skowronek 2001: 63). Thus, this typological characteristic of Polish provides fertile ground for critically-oriented analysis of ideologies in online political discussions. Below, I examine the role of language typology in contemporary Polish political discourse by analysing examples of suffixation and compounding. I use a triangulated approach that considers the importance of language typology for critical discourse analysis of political talk in participatory social media. In doing so, I focus on the discursive effects of newly created words on how online forum users represent, position, and reference an unrecognised minority in Poland. Following Lieber (2017), I understand suffixation as a type of derivation that involves a modification of the lexical base by adding a suffix (e.g., Pol. kotek ‘little cat’ from kot ‘cat’ + -ek). I define compounding as a process wherein two or more lexemes are combined to form a new word, as in the samosąd example. Prior research in critical discourse studies has shown that nouns and nominal phrases are instrumental in ideological struggles. Among these, naming practices remain a common strategy for producing and supporting discourses (Thurlow 2006). For instance, political actors employ catchwords to construct in-groups and out-groups, constructing ideologically preferred discursive realities. Thielemann (2016), who studied linguistic creativity in Polish political discourse, argues that

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catchwords help to delineate different political camps. As I show, the language typological affordances of a synthetic language like Polish increase its potential to become a political tool through derivation and compounding. While some of my examples fall into the category of code-switching (MyersScotton 1997; Poplack 2008) or translanguaging (Otheguy et al. 2015; Wei 2018), my argument extends beyond these phenomena to encompass any morphological activity that creates new words and meanings. This feature is present in Polish online political discourse regardless of the origin of morphological bases. For instance, the neologism szlezjer ‘self-identified Silesians’ (pejoratively, from Germ. Schlesier ‘resident of Silesia’) ranks high in frequency in my data. Aside from its base form, anti-Silesian commenters use its numerous derivatives that accrue even more ideological import (see Borowski 2020 for a detailed case study). Thus, szlezjer gives root to szlezjerki (‘little szlezjers’, pejorative diminutivisation), szlezjery (‘szlezjers’, pejorative transformation into a non-masculine plural form), szlezjerstwo (‘szlezjerdom’, pejorative collective), and so on. Such examples suggest that the typological language features of Polish are the main driving force behind these coinages and that translanguaging happens to be the byproduct. Importantly, the presence of foreign-origin stems in such coinages has, above all, ideological, not sociolinguistic or language-contact, motivations. The focus on typological language features and discursive actions is not new. Ikegami (1990: 49) proposed a typologically-oriented discourse analysis, arguing that “languages differ tendentially as to the structural and functional potentialities of the text they produce”. Stemming from a typological language perspective to interlinguistic variation (Greenberg 1974), this proposition found its place in the field of text linguistics, a precursor of modern-day (critical) discourse studies. Myhill (2003) observed that there is little research on the intersection of typology and discourse analysis due to the difficulty in integrating both approaches into language-in-use. Nevertheless, Myhill argues that this intersection has the potential to bear significant fruit, stating that “typology and discourse analysis … have much to offer each other” (Myhill 2003: 171).

The sociopolitics of Silesian identity and the “camouflaged German option” The case study in this chapter traces its sociopolitical roots back to a controversial catchphrase in a 2011 document issued by the Law and Justice (Pol. Prawo i Sprawiedliwość) political party. The document included the phrase “camouflaged German option” (Pol. zakamuflowana opcja niemiecka) about self-identified Silesians, a self-proclaimed minority in southern Poland.

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Istnieje wiele przesłanek, by twierdzić, że kategoria Narodu nie jest podnoszona w programach i zasadniczych wystąpieniach przedstawicieli PO, choć mówi się tam o Polakach czy pozycji Polski. Z drugiej strony, PO w swoim przekazie mocno podkreśla znaczenie regionalizmów, czego szczególnym przykładem jest ostentacyjne akcentowanie przez Donalda Tuska swojej kaszubskości. Niedawno umieszczono, wbrew wyrokowi Sądu Najwyższego z 2007 roku, narodowość śląską w spisie powszechnym. Sąd Najwyższy słusznie bowiem wywiódł, że historycznie rzecz biorąc, niczego takiego jak naród śląski nie ma. Można dodać, że śląskość jest po prostu pewnym sposobem odcięcia się od polskości i przypuszczalnie przyjęciem po prostu zakamuflowanej opcji niemieckiej. (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość 2011: 34–35) ‘There are numerous premises to maintain that the category of People is not raised in the programmes and principal addresses made by representatives of the Civic Platform,1 although Poles or the position of Poland are mentioned there. However, the Civic Platform strongly emphasises in its message the meaning of regionalisms, of which Donald Tusk’s ostentatious stress on his Kashubianness2 is a particular example. Recently, Silesian nationality was included in the national census, against a 2007 ruling of the Supreme Court, for the Supreme Court rightly deduced that, historically speaking, there is no such thing as the Silesian people. It can be added that Silesianness is simply a certain way of detaching oneself from Polishness and, probably, of simply assuming a camouflaged German option.’ (translation and emphasis mine)

Before World War One, most of the historical region of Silesia belonged to Germany ever since Prussia wrestled Upper Silesia from Austria in the mideighteenth century. In the interbellum, the Polish part of Silesia enjoyed autonomous status. Given this precedent, Silesian activists nowadays demand that Poland grant autonomy to the historical region of Silesia. Commonly conflated with separatism, demands for Silesian autonomy in post-1989 Poland have elicited surprise mixed with suspicion, inducing fears of German involvement in Polish matters. According to one explanation, granting autonomy could lead to separation of the region from Poland and, presumably, its reincorporation into Germany. That is why the phrase “camouflaged German option” was directed not at ethnic Germans, but Silesian activists.3 1. Pol. Platforma Obywatelska (PO) is a right-of-centre political party in Poland. 2. Kashubians are a linguistic minority based in northern Poland. Their language, Kashubian, is officially recognsised as a regional language according to the 2005 Act on National and Ethnic Minorities and Regional Language. 3. Many residents of Silesia and particularly self-identified Silesians reacted to this statement with surprise, incredulity, and outrage. The use of such anti-Silesian (and, consequently, antiGerman) rhetoric by the Law and Justice milieu was not without influence on the results of

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Once this phrase leaked into mainstream media, it quickly became a major talking point in the 2011 Parliamentary elections. The long-term effect of such usage was the discursive production of an inextricable link between Silesian organisations and “some kind of an anti-Polish ideology, without even attempting to explain this notion” (Buchowski and Chlewińska 2012: 7). The document’s edited version later specified that the phrase only referred to self-identified Silesians who reject a simultaneous Polish national identification. Nevertheless, the phrase quickly gained notoriety and became a pejorative catch-all for Silesian activism and self-identified Silesians, including members of the Silesian Autonomy Movement.4

Pro-Silesian and anti-Silesian discourses in online political discussions The Western Daily comments sections represent the participatory social media environment examined in this chapter. Its comments sections constitute an arena of intense, ethnically-inflected conflict between self-identified Silesians and members of the Polish majority. The former group has discursively claimed this space, frequently commenting and promoting the Silesian perspective on recent events. Through their ongoing activism, those commenters have transformed it into an online “safe space” for those who believe that Silesians represent a minority on their own, not a subset of Poles. Below, I refer to those posters as members of the “pro-Silesian camp”, while their adversaries belong to the “anti-Silesian camp.” Although different from one another, the Western Daily comment sections are similar in how they mediate the production of pro-Silesian and anti-Silesian discourses. As a newspaper, the Western Daily has the largest circulation among the dailies in Silesia and Opole Provinces (southern Poland). Its electronic edition consists of news stories, comments sections, and other content (photo galleries, the 2011 national census. One of its most striking results was that the number of self-identified Silesians (allowed to declare by writing in) has skyrocketed to about 850,000 people, an almost fivefold increase. Polish sociologists and political scientists interpreted these results as a protest against the discriminatory narrative about Silesians. In popular culture, opposition to this narrative found its expression in pro-Silesian apparel, including t-shirts with the phrase “camouflaged German option” printed on them. 4. The Silesian Autonomy Movement (Pol. Ruch Autonomii Śląska, RAŚ) is an organisation established in the early 1990s that advocates granting autonomy to the historical region of Silesian within Poland. In recent decades, the Movement has increased its visibility on the regional political scene, becoming one of the most vocal advocates for Silesian identity with its focus on the legal recognition of Silesian ethnicity and Silesian language by the Polish state.

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quizzes, etc.). Until early 2019, the comment box included separate fields for a comment, its title, and signature. Following changes, the title field is no longer there. While anonymous comments were widespread before the changes (see Figures 1 and 2), creating an account is now a requirement for commenting. The comment box represents a text-only affordance, with no additional content (such as images or videos) allowed. Consequently, political discussions there are based on textual conversations, elevating written discourse to the major tool of constructing social reality.

Figure 1. The comment box under Western Daily news stories before the 2019 changes (image source: Screen capture from https://dziennikzachodni.pl)

Figure 2. The comment box under Western Daily news stories after the 2019 changes (image source: Screen capture from https://dziennikzachodni.pl/marsz-autonomiiprzeszedl-przez-katowice-slaska-flaga-i-prawykonanie-hymnu-slaskiego-wideo-zdjecia /ar/13339452?najstarsze#art-komentarze, last accessed on 29 June 2019)

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Case study: The “camouflaged German option” (CGO) discourse The first example including a widespread stereotype about self-identified Silesians is a case in point.5 (1) W wyniku burzliwej historii Górnego Śląska powstała podklasa / – grupa folksdojczowskiego lumpenproletariatu słowiańskiego pochodzenia, którego aspiracje sprowadzały się do bycia wiernym służącym niemieckich panów. ‘A s a result of the turbulent history of Upper Silesia, an underclass emerged / – a group of Volksdeutsch6 lumpenproletariat of Slavic origin whose aspirations boiled down to being faithful servants of [their] German lords.’

The comment discursively constructs self-identified Silesians as a Volksdeutsch underclass whose members exhibit a servile attitude toward Germans. Defined as “a person included in the list of people of German origin, privileged in relation to the Polish populace” during the Nazi occupation of Poland (SJP 2019), the noun Volksdeutsch (nativised in Polish to folksdojcz) bears negative connotations in the popular imagination to this day. Figuratively, the term is a reference to traitors of Poland. While the form volksdeutsch does exist in Polish, its adjectival form in Example (1) is rare, although morphologically possible.7 That is also the case here as the anonymous poster creates the form folksdojczowski using the possessive suffix -owski (Kuć 2007; Sieradzki 2016). A similar anti-German sentiment is present in comments (2) and (3). (2) ksiądz biskup ma u was przechlapane a kim wy jesteście żeby miał się tym przeimować ? / Dużo was nie ma ot kolejna sekta pewnie Świadkowie Jehowy w województwie mają podobną liczebność jak wyznawcy szlyzjeryzmu. Ja tam 5. Before the 2019 changes, each comment left under news stories published in the Western Daily digital edition consisted of a comment title and comment proper, here separated by a slash (“/”). While comment titles are no longer present in the comments sections after the 2019 changes, the distinction between the title and the comment itself is preserved in the examples for clarity. 6. A Nazi-era term used in reference to ethnic Germans, people of German ancestry living outside Germany. In contemporary, metaphorical usage, it denotes pro-German traitors of the host nation. 7. The Polish National Corpus (Pol. Narodowy Korpus Języka Polskiego, NKJP) yields only one result for the form “folksdojczowski” (cf. http://nkjp.uni.lodz.pl/?q=y33no5s3). However, the form does appear in online discussions, which points to the ideological importance of Volksdeutsch as an idea and its conceptual availability for political conversations in modern-day Poland.

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twierdzę, że powinniście dokonać prawidłowego przekładu bibli. Naród wybrany to oczywiście NARUT SZLYZJERSKI (…). ‘His Excellency Bishop8 is toast – and who are you all to make him care about that? / There aren’t many of you, just another sect, Jehovah’s Witnesses in this province are probably as numerous as adherents of Schlesierism. I on the other hand believe that you should carry out a proper translation of the Bible. The chosen people were obviously the SCHLESIER PEEPULL (…).’ (3) RAŚ to organizacja antypolska / Poloki, dejcie pozor na kryptoRAŚoli we instytucjach kulturalnych, mediach i kajs indziyj. Stop oberszlezjerskiemu szowinizmowi. ‘The SAM [Silesian Autonomy Movement]9 is an anti-Polish organisation. / Hey Poles, be aware of crypto-SAMists in cultural institutions, media, and elsewhere. Stop Oberschlesier10 [Upper Silesian] chauvinism.’

The comment in (2) appeared under an interview with Wiktor Skworc, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Katowice (Silesia Province). In the interview, Skworc stated: “We live in Silesia, but we are Poles” (Pustułka 2011), causing uproar among pro-Silesian users of the Western Daily forum. In response to numerous posts criticising this statement, the commenter in (2) called proSilesian posters “adherents of Schlesierism”. This nominalization strategy marks them as radical ideologues willing to re-write history to further their goals. In doing so, the commenter employed the neologism szlezjeryzm, derived from the word Schlesier (‘Silesian’ in German). The German trope in (3) is present in the neologism oberszlezjerski, intended to mean “Upper Silesian”. Despite using a mix of Polish and Silesian, the comment’s author nevertheless uses the German-derived coinage instead of its Polish equivalent (górnośląski “Upper Silesian”). Thus, the commenter performs discursive othering of Silesian activists whose camouflaged character is simultaneously revealed (hence the idea of “crypto-SAMists”, or “secret activists of the Autonomy Movement”). While the examples hitherto include instances of derivation, compounding represents yet another strategy for reproducing CGO discourse in the Western Daily forum.

8. Wiktor Skworc, Archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Katowice. 9. See footnote 5. 10. Germ. Oberschlesien ‘Upper Silesia’.

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(4) Gris Got Schlonzaken. Wyważony artykuł pani Wieczorek wywołał u was paroksyzm wściekłości, hehehe / Wasz idol Kupka chciał “państwa górnośląskiego” jak było oczywiste, że Niemcy Śląska nie utrzymają. Tak wtedy Niemcy mogliby się zgodzić na takie “państwo” tylko po to, żeby Śląsk nie wrócił do Macierzy. To wtedy Niemcy zaczęli piepszyć w bambus o jakimś tam “narodzie górnośląskim”, który nigdy wcześniej nie istniał. I do dziśiej nie istnieje. Bo Ślązak to Polak (a ściślej mówiąc Polok) a Schlesier to Niemiec. A Ślonzojcz to ani Polak ani Niemiec, to zwykłe nic. ‘God bless, Schlonsacks. A balanced article by Ms. Wieczorek caused an attack of fury in you, ha ha ha. / Your idol, Kupka,11 wanted “an Upper Silesian state” once it was clear that Germany will not be able to support Silesia. Yes, Germany would then say yes to such a “state” only so that Silesia does not return to the Motherland (= Poland). It was then when Germans started lying about some kind of “an Upper Silesian people”, which never existed before. And doesn’t exist until today. Because a Silesian is a Pole (or, strictly speaking, a Pole),12 and a Schlesier is a German while a Ślonzojcz13 is neither a Pole nor a German, it’s simply nothing.’

In (4), the commenter addresses pro-Silesian posters collectively, arguing that the idea of an Upper Silesian people is an artificial construct. In doing so, the commenter frames the Silesian identity debate as an essentially Polish-German conflict over the region. Suggesting that the only viable options for national identification involve Germans or Poles, the poster coins the term Ślonzojcz to talk about those who refuse to unambiguously self-identify as Germans or Poles. Morphologically, this neologism is a combination of the Polish word for ‘Silesian’ (ślonz-) and the German word for ‘German’ without the initial d (-[d]ojcz). The infix -o-, commonly used to mark the presence of two or more features in one word (cf. Pol. niebiesk-o-zielony ‘blue-green’), connects the two parts. Thus, the designation ślonzojcz becomes a covert way of saying that recognition-seeking Silesians are camouflaged representatives of German interests, as is evident from the commenter’s suggestions about the idea of an Upper Silesian people. 11. Teofil Kupka (1885–1920), an Upper Silesian activist with a pro-Silesian stance on the future of the region. 12. While the poster uses a local, Silesian version of the word, it does not change its meaning, hence the double use of the word “Pole” in the translation. 13. A compound created from Ślonzak/Ślonzok ‘Silesian [male]’ and the nativised form dojcz ‘German’ (from Germ. Deutsche ‘Germans’).

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This trope is also present in Example (5) where the idea of ślonzojczs, German-oriented Silesians, extends to Jerzy Gorzelik (Silesian Autonomy Movement leader) through a newly-coined adjective. (5) Aha. I chciołech pedzieć, że Pietrzykowski w przeciwieństwie do Gorzelika, to porzadny Ślonzok. / Nigdy by się Pietrzykowski nie zhańbił powiedzeniem “momy sto tałzynów unterszriftów”. Bo on jest Ślazakiem a nie wydumanym ślonzojczowskim upiorem jak Jorguś Gorzelik… ‘A ha. And I wanted to say that unlike [Jerzy] Gorzelik, Pietrzykowski14 is a fine Silesian. / Pietrzykowski would never disgrace himself by saying “we have one tausend unterschrifts”. Because he’s a Silesian, and not a made-up Ślonzojcz phantom like Georgie Gorzelik…’

The trope of Silesian identity’s implicit German connection is further present in example (6). (6) Kolejny dzień RAŚtapowskiej nagonki na Semik i Pietrzykowskiego / Trwa kolejny dzień nagonki RAŚtapo na Redaktorke i Profesora. Jeśli ktoś miał wątpliwości, czy RAŚtapo w sposób zorganizowany i systematyczny wykorzystuje fora internetowe do wpływania na opinie publiczną, to teraz te wątpliwości znikają. Wystarczy poczytać kilka poniższych wpisów, które są podobne w treści i wymowie. Podobna nienawiść do tych, którzy mają inne poglądy niż raśiole-gorole, co to robią za dupnych Ślonzoków. Dostaniecie sto tałzynów kopów wrzić za to wasze raśiolsko-gorolskie chamstwo. Będziecie cierpieć RAŚtapowcy, buuuuuahahahahaha ‘Another day of the RAŚtapo15 manhunt on Semik16 and Pietrzykowski. / Another day of the RAŚtapo-sponsored manhunt on the editor and the professor continues. If anyone had doubts if RAŚtapo, in an organised and systematic manner, uses Internet forums to influence public opinion, then those doubts are now disappearing. It’s enough to read through some of the entries below, similar in content and meaning. [There’s] similar hate to those with views different from RAŚists-foreigners who pretend to be lousy Silesians. You will receive one thousand kicks in the butt for this RAŚist-foreigner boorishness of yours. You will suffer, RAŚtapoers, buuuuuahahahahaha.’

14. Tomasz Pietrzykowski, professor at the University of Silesia and former governor of the Silesia Province.

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In this example, the poster combines the acronym RAŚ (Pol. Ruch Autonomii Śląska, Silesian Autonomy Movement) with Gestapo, the Nazi secret police force, to produce RAŚtapo and four other neologisms (the adjective RAŚtapowski, the group names raśiole and RAŚtapowcy, and the adjective raśiolski). All these forms arose thanks to the use of suffixation to coin new Polish words. Thus, the commenter exploits the relative derivational freedom afforded by the Polish language to produce a negative message about Silesian activists. Using the Nazi reference, the commenter amplifies their assumed ideological zeal. Collectively, the examples analysed in this section show how posters in the Western Daily comments section take advantage of the possibilities offered by Polish to produce ideological political messages that reproduce CGO discourse. As commenters discuss self-identified Silesians and their place in Poland, they employ historically relevant terms (e.g., Volksdeutsch). In doing so, anti-Silesian commenters draw on German vocabulary but do not shy away from exploiting the derivational elasticity of Polish to make their point. As a result, the online continuation of the CGO discourse produces pejorative and discriminatory representations of Silesian activism and self-identified Silesians that place them on a lower level in the hierarchy of desired identities. Consequently, narratives about Silesians as “camouflaged Germans” perpetuate feelings of fear, distrust, and suspicion. These narratives steer the public debate in a specific direction – that of the German past of the region and potential German revisionism years after the end of World War Two.

Conclusions In this chapter, I have discussed the importance of language typology in the context of non-elite political discourse produced in text-only participatory social media. I argue that language typology allows for several nomination strategies in online political communication. My case analysis demonstrates how anonymous posters engage with CGO discourse, reproduce it online, and harness the linguistic affordances of Polish to amplify their messages. While the numerous derivative messages share similar ideological content, they come in different linguistic forms. My analysis also suggests that the technological affordances of participatory social media play an instrumental role in shaping behaviour, as evidenced through language-in-use. The text-only restriction forces commenters to 15. A compound created from RAŚ (Silesian Autonomy Movement, Pol. Ruch Autonomii Śląska) and Gestapo (Germ. Geheime Staatspolizei), the secret police of Nazi Germany. 16. Teresa Semik, Western Daily journalist.

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use exaggerated language and cognitive schema to argue their point. This finding goes hand in hand with Jones’s (2018) observations about the role of social actors’ inventiveness in the appropriation of affordances and constraints of cultural tools for action. As commenters learn to navigate novel mass communication tools, they experiment with new forms of getting their message across that vary in their effectiveness. In this chapter, commenters look for novel ways of ridiculing Silesian activism online and find a solution in creatively crafted yet strongly discriminating insults used in their repetitive performances of pejorative anti-Silesianness. In their quest for support, users of online discussion forums have to become skilful masters of words. The typological affordances of Polish provide them with just such an opportunity. In this chapter, I have also highlighted how a triangulated approach to political talk (critical discourse analysis – language typology – participatory social media) reveals the complex fabric of social actors, representations, and practices that make discourses persist over time. My investigation shows how commenters instrumentalize the language typological characteristics of Polish to scapegoat and erase ethnic differences. The findings suggest that typological-oriented critical language analysis of discourses makes it possible to reveal the linguistic mechanisms behind constructing and promoting discriminatory messages. Digital mediation plays a nontrivial role in that process. In this case study, the constraints of text-based comments sections and the affordances of the language of political talk intersect to design an environment wherein social actors (proand anti-Silesian commenters) and processes (debating, discriminating, stereotyping) emerge as a result of the ongoing production of political content. This discursive design suggests that future developments in social media-oriented critical discourse analysis need to account for the granular practices performed within the range of technical tools available and their broader sociopolitical or sociohistorical meanings to arrive at detailed explanations of discursive phenomena. My approach in this chapter is but one step in this direction. I hope that subsequent works will further illuminate how digital environments produce and shape discourses, including the role of web users. This study represents an exploratory investigation of the intersection of online discourse and language typology. I hope that future works will use the considerations proposed in this chapter to build foundations for more locally grounded paradigms of critical discourse analysis. The nuanced approach of this chapter yields tangible results for the field of critical discourse studies. First, such an approach provides momentum for developing new theoretical models concerning conceptualising discourse as language-in-use. It avoids the homogenising effect of adopting and applying Anglo-centric modes of communication to

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non-Western communicative situations, demonstrating the usefulness of locally grounded approaches to discourse. Finally, my approach counteracts theoretical and methodological stagnation by promoting a novel conceptualisation of language-in-use as a discursive resource available to specialists and laypersons.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor of this volume for their insightful comments and suggestions that helped to improve this chapter. As always, any shortcomings are my own.

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Online counterspeech and the targeting of digital discourses of racism in New Zealand Philippa Smith

Auckland University of Technology

This chapter seeks to locate online counterspeech in the relatively new framework of Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) by examining the discursive strategies used to counter the racist discourse beneath a YouTube video. I argue that online counterspeech – a phenomenon whereby the Internet is used as a platform to challenge another person’s speech or ideology whether race, religion, or political beliefs – is worthy of critical examination as its associated discourses are inherent in the many-to-many dynamic of bottom-up online social interaction. Innovative ways of investigation such as SM-CDS are called for on top of the traditions in CDS where existing frameworks may fall short in accounting for the techno-discursive dynamic of digital discourse and the way new environments may produce new dynamics of power and influence in discourse formation and consumption. Keywords: online counterspeech, racism, Social Media-Critical Discourse Studies, YouTube, New Zealand

Introduction On 15 June 2017, the New Zealand Human Rights Commission (HRC) uploaded a video to various social media platforms as part of a carefully-crafted public campaign to educate New Zealanders about casual racism. Also known as microaggression (Sue 2010), this includes making jokes or throw-away comments about a person’s ethnicity or race, often conducted unconsciously in everyday speech and behaviour, which become accepted as the norm. Titled Give Nothing to Racism, and presented by internationally known New Zealand actor/director Taika Waititi, the video parodied a public service announcement requesting people not to donate to racism by way of their behaviour. It went viral via YouTube, as well as https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.100.08smi © 2023 John Benjamins Publishing Company

Online counterspeech and the targeting of digital discourses of racism in New Zealand

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, featured prominently in mainstream media, and reached more than four million people in the first month (Devoy n.d.). Besides the many positive comments posted about the video online, it also attracted the attention of extreme right-wing groups. On one such website, a blogger claimed the video was propaganda that “targets Whites” and they praised the “racists [who] dominated the comments sections on Facebook and YouTube” (Red Ice.TV 2017). The irony, of course, is that a video designed to fight racism attracted overt racist rhetoric and trolling behaviour on social media. Some YouTube commenters, however, unwilling to accept this as normative discourse, sought to counter it. It is the anti-racist discourse in the YouTube comments section as a form of counterspeech that I have chosen to focus on in this study from a Social Media Critical Discourse Studies perspective, because “the critical analysis of digital meaning-making is not complete without effective consideration of the impact of the new mediation paradigm” (KhosraviNik 2020: 2). I am interested to see how commenters on YouTube take the racism of others to task and how they try to change that narrative within the techno-discursive design of a social media platform. While YouTube was conceived as a video-sharing platform (established in 2004 and owned by tech giant Google since 2005), its participatory nature classifies it as a social networking site (see Soukup 2014 for the full range of uses of YouTube). The inclusion of ethnographic observation of the bottom-up discursive practices of commenters on social media, who previously have struggled to have their voices heard publicly, therefore make it interesting in comparison to the bulk of Critical Discourse Studies and their concentration on the top-down discourse of elite groups. The comments section on YouTube meets the three conditions (KhosraviNik 2017) that constitute what is referred to as a Social Media Communication (SMC) environment, which calls for a SM-CDS approach. This chapter is divided into four sections. First, I introduce the notion of online counterspeech that is increasingly capturing the attention of academics across disciplines. I highlight the diversity of the research that is slowly building on this topic – but also point to a lack of recognition of online counterspeech as a named, researchable topic within the fields of linguistics and critical discourse studies. Second, I briefly review the new paradigm of SM-CDS and the principles of CDS that it is built upon. I point to the multi-dimensionality of social media data, which requires a “more nuanced analysis” when it comes to the study of text, society, and social media institutions and which SM-CDS seeks to address (KhosraviNik and Unger 2016: 214). Third, I present the case study of the YouTube anti-racism comments as a form of online counterspeech, referred to above, to demonstrate the application of SM-CDS in a field not previously considered in this context. While the comments are the focus of textual analysis, the emphasis

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by SM-CDS scholars on the inclusion of digital ethnographic observation extends the important CDS principle of context to consider the techno-discursive design of social media and how the “new SMC dynamic” (KhosraviNik 2020: 2) works with regard to digital discourses. I conclude the chapter by reflecting on SM-CDS as an approach to gain insights into the discursive strategies of online counterspeech that have much to offer in countering negative discourses that go beyond racism, and may also be used to tackle misogyny, hate, misinformation, and extremist ideologies.

Researching online counterspeech The technological affordances of social media platforms – particularly the ability for users to communicate unseen and anonymous from behind their digital keyboards – have given rise to a plethora of negative online behaviours involving the dissemination of mis/disinformation or the aggressive targeting of people with hateful or abusive speech. Online anonymity – particularly on social media platforms – can lead to polarising effects (Sia, Tan, and Wei 2002) and to online disinhibition (Suler 2004), whereby the lack of in-person interactions can result in more intense or toxic behaviour that may not be normally conducted in faceto-face situations. Online behaviour such as cyberbullying or trolling – the latter specifically adopting “online antagonism … for amusement’s sake” (Hardaker 2015: 202) – can have devastating effects on the victims of such abuse, while the dissemination of fake news, or mis/dis-information, can lead to polarisation. While a great deal of research has been conducted on what is referred to as the “dark side” of social media (Fiser and Smith 2020), scholarly interest in online counterspeech that serves to counter these negative behaviours by offering alternative views or reprimanding behaviour is only just beginning to surface. Determining a common definition for online counterspeech has not been forthcoming in the academic literature, perhaps because an all-encompassing explanation of counterspeech is seen to suffice, such as New York law professor Nadine Strossen’s (2018:xxii) suggestion of “any speech that counters or responds to speech with a message that the speaker rejects, including ‘hate speech’”. However, counterspeech in the online context should be regarded as more than just the transference of Strossen’s definition to encapsulate digital environments when consideration needs to be given to SMC which may nudge users towards a particular style of discursive practice by the rewards the systems assign to conflict and attention-grabbing (KhosraviNik 2019). Online counterspeech, in fact, needs to be positioned in relation to how it can avail itself of more engaged networks within society through technological

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means. Richards and Calvert (2000: 533), for example, note that critical feminist and race theorists have in the past highlighted the “limited access to the means of communication”, particularly when editors or publishers may be reluctant to publish the words of those who might want to criticise an individual in a position of power. The opportunity for counterspeech activists to publish their own words and images in online environments, these scholars state, offers the possibility to overcome such obstacles and prejudices that exist within traditional communication practices. The benefit for scholars, too, is that ethnographic observation of SMC can greatly enhance our understanding of online behaviours and relationships within digitally mediated spaces. The small body of studies investigating online counterspeech on social media platforms is spread thinly across disciplines ranging from the social sciences to computer science. These studies include quantitative analyses of social media interaction to build a set of machine-learning models to detect counterspeech (Mathew et al. 2019; Schmitt et al. 2018) and the deliberative posting of positive comments by researchers to oppose racism on a Facebook page which they found encouraged others to do the same (Miškolci et al. 2018). Counterspeech strategies that work both productively and unproductively have been identified through the examination of social media platforms (Bartlett and Krasodomski-Jones 2015; Benesch et al. 2016), including online persuasion as a way to change people’s thinking, such as the case of a woman whose extreme homophobic beliefs were completely transformed by other commenters (Wright et al. 2017). However, the lack of analysis of online counterspeech at the level of language to understand the socially shaping intersection of technology and discourse is evident. If online counterspeech is to be situated within a SM-CDS approach that is concerned with meaning-making content and digital practices, a linguistic and discourse focus is required. Certainly, those linguists embracing social media in their work have focused on aspects that can be seen to have relevancy to online counterspeech. This includes relational work in terms of the formation and negotiation of identities and relationships online, particularly with behaviour that offends (Locher and Watts 2005), stance-taking (Tagg, Seargeant, and Brown 2017), disagreement (Stromer-Galley, Bryant, and Bimber 2015), conflict and aggression (GarcíaGómez 2018; Lorenzo-Dus et al. 2011), or response types within (im)politeness studies (Culpeper 2011; Culpeper et al. 2003; Hardaker 2015). While these studies are less concerned with argumentation as a discourse strategy – unlike the Discourse-historical Approach of CDS (Reisigl and Wodak 2016) – they still offer analytical tools or frameworks that can be usefully employed in a SM-CDS approach to online counterspeech. As Unger, KhosraviNik and Wodak (2016: 2) note, CDS scholars’ interest in complex social phenomena requires them to draw

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on “different disciplines and [to] make use of different methods”. Given the principle of interdisciplinarity within CDS (Unger 2016), therefore, I propose that inspiration can be drawn from such language-focused studies when it comes to applying analytical tools or theories as part of a SM-CDS approach to online counterspeech and which I proceed to demonstrate later in this chapter’s case study. First, however, it is important to highlight the opportunities SM-CDS offers researchers of social media communication.

Social Media-Critical Discourse Studies The emergence of Social Media Critical Discourse Studies as a CDS approach in the last decade is timely as the participatory Web offers access to observe a wealth of online behaviours and to collect these as data for analysis. Because of the theoretical and methodological challenges for CDS scholars with the social media dynamic, a new paradigm was called for to take into account the affordances of technology, the multiple genres that are encapsulated, and the interactionality of digital platforms in the construction of online discourses (see KhosraviNik and Unger 2016 for a more detailed discussion of this). Approaches such as Herring’s (2004) Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis and Androutsopoulos’ (2008) discourse-centred online ethnography have made headway in understanding the impact of technological change when it comes to online social interaction, and both of these academics call for computer-mediated communication research to shift its focus to a user-centred contextual approach with problem-orientedness to guide the analysis. In responding to this call, SM-CDS offers a more critically oriented perspective on the analysis of social media discourse by linking the horizontal context of discourse practice across the participatory Web (media practices and content) with vertical contexts involving the “wider socio-political context of a given society” (KhosraviNik 2017: 586). While SM-CDS maintains the principles of traditional CDS (namely, discourse, power, and ideology) and its concern, broadly speaking, with critical analysis of discourse to interrogate social phenomena (Ainsworth and Hardy 2004), its move to encourage new thinking about social interaction observed in the context of digitally facilitated spaces is timely. As KhosraviNik (2017: 588) notes, “problematic discourses popular within CDS that are now disseminated through new affordances are still subjects of research alongside the positive impacts on public discourse and representation”. SM-CDS incorporates more than just sociopolitical and media contexts in terms of the given topic. Key to this new approach is consideration of the interactive context of social media data and the impact of media technological characterization in terms of communicative

Online counterspeech and the targeting of digital discourses of racism in New Zealand

resources and multimodal capabilities including “language, image, video, music, sharing, likes, visuals etc.” (KhosraviNik and Unger 2016: 214). Therefore “screen-based data” are examined in conjunction with associated digital practices rather than concentrating solely on the textual and discursive analysis of digital content in isolation (KhosraviNik and Amer 2020: 6). This enables an understanding of the “digital/local context of meaning-making” within the discourse community (KhosraviNik and Amer 2020: 10). Social media platforms are regarded as not just virtual spaces for digital users to upload content or interact with others. These users also bring to the virtual public sphere the ideological beliefs and attitudes inherent in their offline lives. While emergent SM-CDS research has focused on topics such as identity politics (Sarkhoh and KhosraviNik 2020) or gender-based hostility (KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018), more recent studies show the expanse in the use of this paradigm, such as celebrity digital discourses and political expression in art (see Critical Discourse Studies March 2022 Special Issue). Therefore, exploring how online counterspeech might fit within SM-CDS presents an interesting scenario as this chapter aims to chart new territory with a case study of the comments that responded to the racist discourse located beneath the Human Rights Commission YouTube video Give Nothing to Racism.

The case study: Countering anti-racist rhetoric on YouTube A brief background to the uploading of the Give Nothing to Racism video on the Human Rights Commission YouTube page and the overall response to it has already been laid out. This section, in adhering to the SM-CDS approach, presents observation of the social media site and its digital practices (digital ethnography) to provide context for the digital content that is to be analysed (anti-racist comments). However, it also provides an opportunity to understand the HRC ideological stance and the video message to indicate what elicited the comments in the first instance. This is followed by a description of how the data comprising online counterspeech comments were collected, followed by an analysis of the category of anti-racism comments. An overlap between the analysis of the digital content of the counterspeech comments and digital practices occurs as the two are so entwined when it comes to discussing SMC as meaning-making. An observation period of the HRC YouTube page promoting its anti-racism campaign was conducted in the first six weeks following the uploading of its Give Nothing to Racism video on 15 June 2017. It is on this page where the intersection of top-down and bottom-up discourses can be observed – with the former being captured in a screenshot (see Figure 1). (Note: this image was captured post-analysis in 2021, though the only changes are the metadata tallies).

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Figure 1. Screenshot of the Give Nothing to Racism video and its presenter Taika Waititi on the NZ Human Rights Commission YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=g9n_UPyVR5s

The digital content of the counter-racism comments that appeared beneath the Give Nothing to Racism video is the main textual unit to be analysed in this chapter and this was captured during the observation period coinciding with the eruption of attention it received through mainstream news outlets and social media. However, the context in which this content is situated is important to discuss first, as this impacts on how the comments were produced and interpreted and provides the backdrop for their analysis. Various semiotic and textual features on this page – its layout, video, and any other written text for example – give a sense of the HRC’s ideological stance and discourse of collective responsibility in fighting racism. Established by the government in 1977 to “promote and protect the human rights of all people in Aotearoa New Zealand” (HRC 2008), the HRC has held racism as one of its primary concerns. The objective for the country, with its historical roots as a bicultural nation

Online counterspeech and the targeting of digital discourses of racism in New Zealand

(indigenous Maori and British settler society), has been to make it more inclusive as multiculturalism increased in the latter part of the 20th century. The placing of the HRC’s title twice beneath the YouTube video, along with its logo, reinforces its brand as an official body committed to encouraging a more socially cohesive and equal society, particularly when it comes to race, religion, disability, and gender. The logo’s artistic depiction of the woven strands of a Maori Cloak signifies the weaving together of a diverse nation (HRC 2008.) The brief four-line paragraph beneath the video elucidates the meaning of casual racism – perhaps in case anyone missed or misunderstood the video message. The use of the deictic “we” pronoun strongly suggests the collective responsibility of New Zealanders to combat racism: “we can stop casual racism … We can give it no encouragement.” A URL link (not shown in Figure 1) directs the viewers to the HRC’s “give nothing to racism” website where videos from other New Zealand celebrities supporting the campaign demonstrate a known strategy in drawing on popular culture figures for promotional purposes (del Mar Garcia de los Salmones et al. 2013). Limitations of space prevent a detailed account of the video in this chapter – even though the video is the focal point of a YouTube page (Benson 2015), it is not the textual unit under analysis in this study into counterspeech. However, its content needs to be noted as it is not only indicative of the HRC’s intention to use humour to attract the audience’s attention to a serious subject of racism, it also identifies the subject that spurred the online comments. The selection of Waititi, as the sole presenter is purposeful as it draws on the popularity of his own “brand” of humour (Stuff 2017), his position as 2017 New Zealander of the Year, and his personal representation of diversity with his indigenous Maori and Jewish heritage. In the video, Waititi fuels the irony of the public service announcement to “give nothing” by instructing the audience in the more subtle ways in which they can contribute to racism, such as smiling, giggling, or nodding in agreement with a racist joke. This satirical humour, as part of the HRC anti-racism campaign, can be seen as a form of “social corrective” that aims to “expose[s] ugly human phenomena… to mockery, in the hope of thereby eliminating them” (Avner 1988: 357). The intent of the account holder of the YouTube page – besides sharing a video and its message – is to also receive feedback and/or interact with the audience. In fact, YouTube pages are “products of mediated social interaction” that involve multiple authorship (channel owner, advertisers, and users who comment, share, like, dislike, etc. (Benson 2015: 84). From a bottom-up perspective, the digital and textual practices available to users were observed through the situation facets (Herring and Androutsopoulos 2015) on the page, such as the icons for likes/dislikes/sharing, etc. While there can only be an “‘imagined “mass” of ordinary users’ of YouTube polylogues” (Bou Franch, Lorenzo-Dus, and Blitvich 2012: 517) along with a silent audience, simply lurking and observing what is tak-

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ing place, the platform metadata gathered during the 6-week observation period indicated the page had been viewed more than 25,000 times and shared with 387,124 others. Users could also express themselves more explicitly through the comments section below the video. The content data selected for analysis in the study – i.e., responses to racist rhetoric – were not easily retrieved because of the way comments are presented on the YouTube page. While YouTube comments are asynchronous, all replies to comments are initially hidden from view and require the user to click on “show replies”, which unravels a thread of discussion or “topical strand” (Dynel 2014: 39). Some commenters strategically bypassed this issue by uploading their responses as new messages (often specifying the pseudonym of whom they were addressing), which gave them instant visibility. Once all of the threads were collected during the observation period, a total of 112 comments, of varying length, uploaded by 62 commenters were identified. This data set had a word count of around 7,000 words after manual data-cleaning was done, i.e., nonsensical and irrelevant comments were discarded. Each commenter is identified (alongside their comment) with their self-selected pseudonym and a small circular badge – either an image of their choice, though few present photographs of themselves, or a default format appears, i.e., the initial/s of their name/pseudonym. For ethical reasons, to avoid identification, these are not shown in this chapter. Little additional information about commenters is observable apart from their comments based on what they say and how. However, the informality of language observed was not unusual for YouTube where comments resemble spoken interaction (Benson 2015), even though there is no facility to interrupt one another – only to respond in turn. In order to narrow down the comments to identify the sample of antiracism comments as the digital content for analysis, it was necessary to determine exactly what these commenters were responding to in the first instance. Following a close reading of the data, the content of all of the comments was coded based on their racist/anti-racism content. Just under 50 per cent of the comments were identified as consisting of some form of racist rhetoric, voiced either through argumentation in their disputing or denial of casual racism (including personal attacks on the presenter Waititi and the HRC race relations commissioner Dame Susan Devoy), by using overt racist language, or expressing racist ideologies that aligned with alt right nationalism or white supremacy. Some of these commenters rejected the video’s message, seeing it as an attack on the dominant white majority in New Zealand as the proponents of racism. In addition, a more extreme category of comments deviated from a discussion of the video and took advantage of the platform to make anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist, and antiimmigrant (especially towards Muslims and Asians) statements. These involved linguistic features such as insults, taboo or swear words, and abusive, degrading,

Online counterspeech and the targeting of digital discourses of racism in New Zealand

and offensive references to the ethnicity or gender of other commenters as evidenced by these examples: “Jewish fecal matter!”, “I have a suggestion for you go to Saudi Arabia or Pakistan and see how wonderful those places are before you condemn WHITE PEOPLE AND WESTERN SOCIETY! Ignorant fucking cunt.” Around 25 per cent of the comments were categorised as attempting to counter such racist discourse in that they either reprimanded this behaviour or offered a more reasoned approach by detailing examples of subtle racism from their personal experience. This smaller data set of online counterspeech examples was analysed for its meaning-making content – to identify discursive strategies that were employed to counter the racist rhetoric within the confines of an online environment. Following the notion of the interdisciplinarity of CDS, as highlighted earlier, and my desire to show how existing analytical frameworks within linguistics and discourse studies might be drawn upon to assist in classifying online counterspeech strategies, I adapted a taxonomy of general response types to (perceived) trolls developed by Hardaker (2015). Her work is situated within (im)politeness studies – a field which demonstrates potential links to the notion of counterspeech in terms of examining “how language interacts with contexts in the mediation of attitudes, identities and emotions” (Culpeper et al. 2017: 7). Strategies of “face attack” (Culpeper 2011: 20) that challenge a person’s or group’s identity or their rights have been considered in (im)politeness studies and were relevant to my study where commenters sought to speak out in defence of those victims of racism. Hardaker used her taxonomy to determine the ways in which UseNet commenters responded to the “impolite” face threatening behaviour of trolls, and she listed these as “engaging, ignoring, exposing, challenging, critiquing, mocking and reciprocating” (Hardaker 2015: 208). Adapting these response types to the context of online counterspeech strategies in my study – where a strategy is defined as a “more or less intentional plan of practice (including discursive practices) adopted to achieve a particular social, political, psychological or linguistic goal” (Reisigl and Wodak 2016: 33) – enabled me to examine how the anti-racist commenters challenged and attempted to change the racist narrative in the confines of the comments sections where participant identities were anonymous and visual social cues were absent. I also sought to identify various linguistic means that supported these strategies – some of which are embodied in digital practice, i.e. how emotion might be conveyed through digital discourse such as the bolding or capitalisation of text.

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Analysis and discussion A close textual analysis of the data set found that each of the seven online counterspeech discursive strategies was used, with commenters often applying more than one in a single post. The following examples are offered to discuss each of the strategies in terms of how commenters used them to counter the views and behaviour of their opponents. a. Engaging sincerely – With text-based comments on social media it is not always easy to be certain of a person’s attitude, motivation, or intention behind the words they express through their computer keyboard. Some commenters, perceiving that the racist ideology of others might result from a lack of knowledge, sought to educate them by engaging sincerely and in good faith, as in this example: Excerpt 1. First things first, being Muslim is a religion, NOT a race. This commenter draws attention to differentiating between race and religion by indicating to the hearer that this is the “step” in their argument. This assists in signalling (without accusation or condemnation) that there is more than one point to make. Though using capitalisation of NOT for emphasis on this first point shows the firmness of their disagreement and the desire to correct what has been said. b. Ignoring the commenter(s) – A commenter’s ignoring of another’s discourse, particularly if they are personally attacked, can be seen as an effective counterspeech strategy, given that seeking to be silent can be a powerful communication tool (Jaworski 1993). In Extract (2) a commenter signals their intention to cease interaction with another commenter in response to his racist rhetoric and therefore become silent and disengage. Excerpt 2. I won’t be entertaining your internet comments [name removed]. Its kind of sad that you get a kick out of making racist comments online. This commenter has been pushed to the limit as they appeared to tire from repeatedly having to defend their Islamic faith after being mocked and ridiculed through personal racist attacks from other commenters. They signal their intention to ignore their abusers indicating that they will no longer engage with such comments by responding to them. The use of the word “entertain” and the “kicking” metaphor reinforce the notion that goading others online by some of the

Online counterspeech and the targeting of digital discourses of racism in New Zealand

racist commenters can be a source of entertainment. The commenter is countering the racist behaviour through disengagement and delegitimisation of the abusers’ actions. c. Exposing a commenter’s tactics – Although Extract (2) involved a direct address to a particular commenter, evidenced not only by including their pseudonym in their post, but also with the second person pronoun “you”, this was also a way to expose their tactics, given that the platform was accessible to a wider “imagined” audience (Marwick and boyd 2011). This comment therefore serves a double function in that it exposes the troll-like tactics of his abuser to others. While it indicates an awareness of the motivation of people to abuse others online for amusement, references to “internet” and “online” acknowledge the affordances and convenience of the Internet and social media whereby avoidance of face-to-face contact and retention of anonymity enable the enactment of such abusive tactics. Similarly, in Extract (3) a commenter exposes how social media technology facilitates the dissemination of racism. Excerpt 3. whenever a video on Youtube denounces racism, people will still come out and defend racism anyway. While the participatory Web may have become a more open space for free speech and the voicing of one’s opinions, it has also become exploited as a place to express extremist views such as racism. The commenter’s use in Extract (3) of the word “whenever” seeks to expose the tactics of such people who purposely use antiracist videos on YouTube as a convenient place to reinforce racism rather than accepting that it exists. Though, interestingly, the words “come out” suggest that the platform also exposes the existence of racist rhetoric which might otherwise be hidden. d. Challenging a commenter’s ideological beliefs or racist rhetoric was a strategy identified in the counterspeech data conducted mainly through argumentation presenting an alternative viewpoint. In Extract (4) a commenter responds to those who claimed that the YouTube video was a thinly-veiled attack on white people, claiming its message was reverse racism. Excerpt 4. Yes, forms of racism exist on all sides, and should end. But the amount of ‘racism’ white people experience on a daily basis is almost non-existent compared to other groups.

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This commenter above indicates their agreement that everyone can be the target of racism using the positive affirmation of “yes”. However, they also move to mitigate this statement with the conjunction “but” and the suggestion that, in spite of this, the level of racism experienced is quantifiable dependent on a person’s colour. The scare quotes around the word racism suggest that white people’s experience of racism is minimal in comparison to non-whites. This comparison is intensified through quantification – indicating frequency in terms of “on a daily basis is almost non-existent”. In doing this the commenter is constructing white people as overreacting to, or making unsubstantiated claims about, the existence of white racism. Where racist rhetoric was more explicit in the comments section, particularly in the use of expletives as demonstrated here where the capitalisation of letters was used for emphasis and is often associated with shouting (Crystal 2006): WHY THE FUCK DOES EVERY RACE FOLLOW WHITES WHEREVER WE GO IF WE ARE SO FUCKING RACIST?, some counterspeech commenters were more direct in their strategy of challenging. This is apparent in Extract (5) where a person who identifies as white indicates her strong objection to the racist comments. Excerpt 5. We as a white British community are a RACIST PACK OF BASTARDS! Get over yourselves and educate yourselves and have some decency!! Your all OK going to hospitals and relying on MUSLIM doctors and surgeons to save lives or MUSLIM police to protect our communities and MUSLIM fire fighters to save us in fires If they are doing something for us, that’s fine!! SERIOUSLY SOMETIMES IM ASHAMED TO BE WHITE! Integral to the comment in Extract (5) is the argument that Muslim people are important members of the community. However, in making this challenge this commenter also positions themself as belonging to the same white British community as those using the racist rhetoric to demonstrate her shame at being associated with them. Although the commenter uses the collective pronoun “we” to indicate their connection to this community, they distance themself from their fellow members, and use variations of the second person plural pronoun “you” (you/your/yourselves) to attack them e.g., “educate yourselves”. They also construct the racist comments negatively using the metaphor of “pack” (alluding to wild animals that roam in groups for protection) along with the taboo word “bastards” to denote their disgust at their behaviour. This denigration to the level of both a wild animal and the historic disgrace attributed to a person born out of wedlock is combined with the suggestion of their negative attributes being uneducated and lacking “decency”. They point out the contradictory attitudes of the racist commenters towards Muslims, presupposing that they have no hesitation

Online counterspeech and the targeting of digital discourses of racism in New Zealand

in taking advantage of their professional contributions to society. The capitalisation in particular of the word MUSLIM three times as an adjective before doctors, police, and firefighters is used to emphasise the positive societal roles played by this religious group. Repeated use of capitalisation and expressive punctuation, particularly double exclamation marks to emphasise anger, are commonplace strategies in computer-mediated communication where there are technical limitations on non-verbal communication (Androutsopoulos 2011). But the conveyance of anger may also be seen as an online counterspeech response within the text of the post, being used to legitimise this commenter’s position that gives them the authority to reprimand others within their own group for their racist behaviour. e. Critiquing the effectiveness, success, or “quality” of the commenter’s argument/ behaviour was mostly used by the counterspeech commenters in negative ways that made the racist commenters look inadequate and laughable. Excerpt 6. So many people commenting on this video… So many dumb cunts that missed the point. Good job white people. These counterspeech comments imply that those people who did not understand the objective of the video lacked the intelligence to do so. In Extract (6) taboo language is used to disparage the category of “white people” who are quantified by the words “so many”, classified as “cunts” and further degraded by the qualifying adjective “dumb”. Their intelligence is mocked further through sarcasm and irony, i.e., the congratulatory remark that they were doing a “good job” in failing to understand the essential message of the video. f.

Mocking or making fun of those commenters who disagreed with or misinterpreted the video also served to undermine the intellectual ability of the white racists.

Excerpt 7. funny as… after reading the comments i can see that none of you got this at all… he is explaining all this in european talk… no its not about the election… but what did crack me up the most was the white fulla’s explaining racism … and you wonder why you didnt get this video… he’s taking the piss out of ALLL of you… lol… The commenter in Extract (7) works in a similar fashion to the one in Extract (6) by combining the strategies of critiquing and mocking. In critiquing the effectiveness of the efforts of those trying to defend racism in New Zealand, this commenter tries to explain to them that they fail to understand that Waititi is using a schema of language and humour in ways that “Europeans” (i.e., white people)

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should understand. But instead, they incorrectly interpret the video as a government strategy to win election votes from minority groups. The racist commenters are doubly mocked in terms of how they are stereotypically represented in this comment as white males who do not realise that the video is actually mocking them. This is evident through the expression “funny as”, the metaphors “cracked me up” and “taking the piss”, and the Internet slang acronym “lol” (laugh out loud). Each of these expressions indicates the counterspeech commenter’s amusement in observing those commenters who fail to realise that they are the target of the video’s satire. The slang expression “white fulla’s” is possibly an intentional misspelling of “fellas” (a non-standard spelling of fellow that alludes to male gender) as, pronounced using the vowel “u” instead of an “e”, it emphasises a derogatory intonation of this word in a New Zealand cultural context suggesting stupidity. The parodying of “stupid white males” in this way further reinforces the notion that this group of racists has a lower than average IQ. g. Reciprocating in kind is a strategy that attempts to impede the effectiveness of a commenter by using the same discursive strategies as them, e.g., tone, taboo language, direct/indirect address. Extract (8) is excerpted from a lengthy online interaction involving posts between a Muslim commenter and several trolls who attack him for his Islamic background by mocking his beliefs, suggesting Muslims are radical and immoral, and repeatedly telling him to go back to his own country. While the Muslim commenter initially engaged civilly with his abusers by offering explanations about Islam, at one point their language and tone change to take on an extremist identity, as noted in Extract (8). Excerpt 8. As soon as im able to, im moving to an islamic country. I would gladly give up the false enjoyments of this world for the hereafter. also lol Mohamedan ay. what an honour it is. i wish i followed the footsteps of the messenger and was a true follower of his. I would wish nothing but to be worth even the sandals he wore. In this extract the commenter is reciprocating in kind, “trolling the trolls” by drawing on the stereotype attributed to Islamic extremists in using a more radical form of talk and goading his abusers. At the same time as parodying Islamic discourse, by referring to the “false enjoyments” of the world, the “honour” of following Mohamed, and the rather tongue-in-cheek comment about wishing to have the same worth as Mohamed’s “sandals”, the commenter is also showing he they cannot be fooled by the tactics of those trolls who seek to get as much of an emotive reaction out of him as possible for their own amusement. The effectiveness of reciprocating in kind led to one of the trolls commenting: LOL, you got to be an

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Alt-right troll. Whether this comment is intended as either sarcasm to indicate that this racist commenter is not being fooled by his change in behaviour, or whether this is a compliment relating to his ability to troll like an Alt-right troll, is not discernible. However, Extract (8) does indicate how the counterspeech strategies of reciprocating in kind, exposing, mocking, and even parodying can be enacted together. The findings above demonstrate how each of the discursive counterspeech strategies identified within the data set worked to challenge and delegitimize those commenters who expressed a racist sentiment. The application of SM-CDS at both the macro-contextual and micro-textual levels then leads to a number of key observations when it comes to considering the role of this mediation technology (i.e., SMC environment) in terms of online counterspeech.

Conclusion The amount of hate, abuse, discrimination, and mis/dis-information that has wended its way from older, more traditional forms of communication into digital environments is both concerning and overwhelming and deserves examination of the ways in which they might be challenged. The case study of YouTube comments below the HRC anti-racism video suggests that SMC, when it comes to countering the digital discourses of racism, offers several advantages. While SMC via a computer or digital device might be directed at a specific group or individual, the interaction is still performed in front of a wider audience which can become more cognisant of ongoing debates about racism. The time lag by way of asynchronous communication might also reduce the pressure for an immediate response, giving others time to contemplate how they might counter the racism, though that is not to say that some commenters are still reactive and emotional with what they post. Commenters also retain some control over their user-generated content through editing or deletion functions. But perhaps the most significant aspect when considering counterspeech is that SMC gives commenters the opportunity to respond anonymously without face-to-face contact. This is particularly advantageous if others display aggressive or hostile language or extremist views. The opportunity to call out those commenters they saw as attempting to hijack the narrative about racism in New Zealand, or merely take advantage of the attention economy that SMC offers by uploading offensive rhetoric, might not have easily presented itself otherwise in the physical world. Those YouTube commenters who expressed racist discourse, therefore, were not only challenged by their opponents, but also represented to the wider (imagined) online audience as being ignorant and lacking

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decency in their uncivil online behaviour. This contrasted with the counterspeech commenters who self-presented positively through their argumentation, trying to demonstrate their superior intellect and/or higher moral values. But while SMC might be lauded for its ability to make bottom-up discourses more visible, another key observation of the analysis found that the technodiscursive architecture of the YouTube platform played a role in how people expressed themselves, potentially affecting the impact of counterspeech. Posted comments were limited to around five lines of text (up to 76 words) before the words “read more” intervened, requiring their selection if the entirety of the message was to be read. In addition, the closed nature of online discussions whereby a viewer must select the words “view × replies” to make them appear is also problematic because they are not initially visible. In addition, discussion threads become more complicated as each reply is opened to reveal further trees of replies. Unless a viewer is keen to follow a thread by manually revealing them, there is the potential for the online counterspeech to become buried in its own echo chamber as a result of the platform’s technological design (KhosraviNik 2018). Although the informal style of the language as noted earlier mimicked conversation, the lack of physical social cues meant that commenters’ tone or meaning was not always discernible, leading to a “shaky” reliance on the use of emoticons or other forms of punctuation. The use of sarcasm was abundant along with taboo language from both racist commenters and some of those who countered them. Therefore, it is also possible that in attempting to convey meaning commenters might have behaved differently than they would in person. In addition to this, the overall appearance of the comments on the YouTube page is a vital consideration in assessing the potential success of the counterspeech in reaching a wide audience. Comments are presented under a category of “most popular” unless the option “newest” is selected by the viewer. Popularity is determined by an algorithm based on likes or shares (Benson 2015), but the owner of the YouTube page – in this case the HRC – is able to influence the order, delete comments or block commenters. Interestingly, the first few months of comments, including those archived for this study, were later removed from the YouTube page. It is not known whether this action was on purpose or through a glitch in the system. However, it raises questions about censorship and challenges the notion of supporting a virtual public sphere that enables democratic debate. Finally, it needs to be stated that while online counterspeech presents an opportunity to tackle racism and shape a more uniformed understanding about it, identifying the effectiveness of these strategies when it comes to how they are interpreted requires further investigation. Apart from analysing the content to determine any responses to counterspeech which could provide useful insights, it

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is only the like and dislike functions of YouTube that might offer an indication of the effectiveness of the strategies. (Though YouTube removed the counts of dislike buttons in 2021 to reduce harassment (Southern, 2021).) While none of the counterspeech comments in the data set received any of these, the racist comments often received up to 20 likes. The suggestion that the views of the unseen audience align with the racist commenters can only be assumed given that the unknown, imagined audience may prefer not to interact and rather form their own views by simply observing the arguments and behaviour of others as they play out in online discussions. Nevertheless, as this chapter argues, SMC still offers opportunities to counter and challenge extreme ideologies and associated discourses that feature online. The framework of SM-CDS enables a better understanding of how counterspeech strategies can operate in this environment. It offers a shift of focus for CDS researchers who can now engage in observation of both top-down (e.g., HRC) and bottom-up (digital users) practices on the participatory Web where the performance of power goes beyond institutions, media, or politicians to incorporate much wider publics. Important lessons can be learned from examining the counterspeech strategies within SMC, given that meaning-making for digital users can become technologically complicated. The critical analysis of users’ digital practices and digital content, whether through social media comments (or through other genres such as online videos, podcasts, or websites), can lead, I believe, to emancipatory outcomes demonstrating the value of counterspeech in challenging viewpoints, ideologies, and various forms of socially unacceptable behaviours online. This is particularly pertinent given that the discourses encountered online should not be considered independent of those that feature offline as they are reflective of society that goes beyond communicative resources (KhosraviNik and Unger 2016).

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Sexism in digital discourses of women Connecting the digital and social dimensions when comparing the #Sendeanlat and #Metoo campaigns Cemile Tokgöz Şahoğlu Marmara University

The chapter points to implicit sexist codes in digital discourses inadvertently produced by women while supporting cyberactivist movements. Drawing on research on feminism and guidelines in Social Media Critical Discourse Studies, the chapter concentrates on the discursive practices of both Turkish and global cyberactivist movements. It tries to show the roots of micro-power produced by users in the context of cultural differences by comparing two campaigns. #MeToo and #SenDeAnlat hashtags have been chosen and analysed by CDS, considering the impact of a digital interface. The analysis includes using sexist language, e.g., degrading words for the female body; reproduction of traditional unequal social roles, e.g., men as protectors and punishers; victim-perpetrator reversal, e.g., victim-blaming through their physical appearance, dress code, and drinking; and developing strategies for adaptation to a sexist order in public spaces.

Introduction According to Castells (2010: 474), the interaction and individualisation characteristics of digital media have presented new cultural tendencies. Time and space have become open to discussion again, and the boundaries between the public and private spheres have blurred. With the feature of interactivity offered by new media and the technological affordances of the participatory web, a new paradigm of communication has emerged across mass and interpersonal communication, i.e., social media communication (KhosraviNik 2020). The audience has become the content producer in a many-to-many dynamic of communication. With the paradigm shift created by the digital turn, social media users are afforded new forms of self-expression and have begun to take advantage of multimedia https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.100.09sah © 2023 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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resources of meaning-making and content production. These developments have led to new narrative forms for lived experiences and gaining insights into new ways of seeing and being seen. Virtual communities that come together independent of physical distance produce content and meaning through collective action. Rheingold (2002) argues that they act like smart mobs who contribute to cultural transformation. These homogeneous groups create collective memories by building a subculture via their collaboration and collective action they take in the ecosystem they have established. Thus, social media spaces are not only spaces where users share their everyday lives, tell their stories and present their selves in social network profiles; they are also digitally afforded discursive spaces wherein group identity, belonging, digital memory, and common imagination are developed. Both textual and visual materials and all forms of meaning-making, including likes, shares, tags, or hashtags, add to discourse circulation on social media (KhosraviNik 2020). Existing social realities affect the digital content and meanings in social media (i.e., digital discourses) and vice versa; content produced in social media permeates everyday life (i.e., social discourses).

Social media and discursive practices Social media are glorified for allowing users to express themselves and organise. Although the digital turn has been described with the concepts of freedom, equality, and democracy, it also expands the dominance of economic and political power over individuals through new practices involving old principles of political-economic controls. The new opportunities that social networks offer regarding social movements, resistance and activism are undoubtedly valuable, but the accompanying issues of digital surveillance, digital labour, economic and cultural capital cannot be ignored. Fuchs (2014) expresses a critical view of social media and emphasises that the fact that the social media users are willing and entertained in content production does not mean that they are less exploited. This critique is linked to how these corporatised communication spaces work (attention economy, monetisation of consumption, etc.) and growing concerns over disinformation, hate speech, and cyberbullying in social media. These economic and technological factors should be considered when analysing discursive trends on social media (KhosraviNik 2019). Social media is designed according to current political-economic outputs. Social networks offer many semiotic resources to their users and participate in the production of social meaning-making. The interface of digital technologies manipulates users’ way of perceiving symbols, expressing themselves, and thinking. Technology is not only a carrier of images but also a material-discursive arte-

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fact (Agamben 2009, as cited in Poulsen et al. 2018: 594). Research on Powerpoint (Zhao et al. 2014) and Reserachgate (Djonov and van Leeuwen 2018) reveals the guiding formative effect of interfaces as social and semiotic artefacts, which van Leeuwen (2005) calls semiotic technology. Digital media, which exalt individualisation and user-generated content features, on the one hand, limits subjectivity, critical discourses and thoughts. Critical discourse is primarily exposed to the standardising filter of algorithms. “Social media can also force our ‘speech will’ or ‘speech plan’, as Bakhtin so nicely put it, into formats that stifle people’s stylistic fingerprints and individual ways of speaking and thinking” (Jovanovic and van Leeuwen 2018: 697). Therefore, given the great potential for digital activism organisation and solidarity, social media can also be transformed into a platform where the dominant social discourses are reproduced in an organised manner. Thus, social media should be considered both a new space of discursive power and a catalyst in the dialectic dynamic of hegemonic discourses in social and digital contexts.

Social media: Critical Discourse Studies In discourse studies, language is described as a struggle to make sense of power relations. The definitions of social reality constantly change throughout this struggle. Social meanings and cultural spheres can never be fixed because of “the arbitrariness of the relationship between the signified and the signifier” (Hall 2003: 31–32). Fairclough (2006: 2) views discourse as a form of hegemonic struggle that reproduces or challenges existing social structures. Discourse builds relationships between situations, people and information objects, constructs their identities and maintains the social status quo. In other words, a “discursive event shapes situations, institutions and social structures, and it is shaped by them” (Unger et al. 2016: 2). Discursive practices affect the production and reproduction of unequal power relations between social groups. Modern power is not imposed on individuals from above but produced below with micro techniques, namely biopolitics in Foucauldian terms. Unequal power relations are legitimised by discourses where discursive practice can contribute to or reproduce inequalities. This approach argues that discourse is a social practice in Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) (Wodak and Fairclough 1997). CDS draws attention to the historical construction of discourse by integrating insights from the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School in the need to critique and change society as opposed to traditional (descriptive) social theory (Wodak and Meyer 2009: 6). The theoretical roots of CDS extend to concepts of the hegemony of Gramsci, the ideological

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apparatus of Althusser, the ideal speech situation of Habermas, the biopolitics of Foucault and the intertextuality of Bakhtin (Durna and Kubilay 2010: 59). “In the participatory web, the nature, location, and dynamic of discursive power are fluid, changeable, and unpredictable” (KhosraviNik and Sarkhoh 2017: 3615). The social media paradigm of communication changes the dynamic of discursive power and the dialectical relations of discourse and individuals. Thus, in Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) (KhosraviNik 2017: 2020), there is an emphasis on the new technological context of discourse production and consumption. Social media is interactive; users of social networks rapidly and collectively produce and consume meanings, and this participatory communication builds discursive power. According to Barton and Lee (2013, as cited in KhosraviNik 2017: 584), “we need to both closely look at texts and to observe users’ lives and beliefs about what they do with their online writing”. In social media culture, mass media discourses are accompanied by interpersonal interaction; users’ discourses become public in social networks and reach the masses. It can be seen as a replacement of official discourses by unofficial discourses (KhosraviNik and Unger 2015: 211). From a critical point of view, power is produced below through micro techniques by social media users who reproduce and recirculate internalised power and dominant discourses. Social media is also called self-made media because user-generated content enables the spread of power ideology and allows advertisers to profit using users’ digital labour. Cultural capital production in social networks imposes a lifestyle and a world of meanings; it indirectly transforms economic capital and ideologically disciplines society (Fuchs 2014: 114). Therefore, social media exploits users both as citizens and consumers, culturally and economically, through their online behaviours. The fundamental features of social media are highly directive in shaping users’ perception and expression processes in social networks, forming their online behaviours, and determining ways of collective action. While explaining the logic of social media, van Dijck and Poell’s (2013) features such as algorithm logic, connectivity, and popularity, fed by the like economy, turn into the predeterminers of digital culture practices at this point. For example, the main logic of Twitter, also discussed in this study, shapes discourse’s nature to be produced there at the design stage. Tweets have a character limit; it is possible to send interrelated tweets to exceed this limit, but the last tweet to appear at the top in the flood impairs the flow of expression, because the aim here is to provide a short fast expression flow. Han (2015) states that with the nature of critical thinking, this flow and speed cannot be accommodated, and it creates a burnout society by being designed to prevent resistance that would slow down the logic of social media. The algorithm of social networks keeps the user in a filter bubble and shows

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homogeneous discourses. In addition, Twitter hashtags classify tweets according to themes. Zappavigna (2011) uses the expression ambient affiliation for hashtags and says that hashtags function to identify the meaning of tweets: In increasing ‘loudness’ in this way, hashtags identify meanings that have become ‘hyper-charged with an additional semiotic pull that may be likened to a gravitational field. They act as both a label for the potential discourse community that they establish and render searchable the coupling that occurs in the tweet.

While persons tagged or retweets contain meanings such as validation and participation in Twitter language, agenda-setting is achieved with quantitatively more retweeted topics. Therefore, a social network’s connectivity and the limits or possibilities of its algorithm shape a discourse’s nature negatively or positively from the very beginning. On the other hand, this stream uses an entertainment element to keep the user on the network: effective entertaining and the catchy characteristics of digital meaning-making impact on the quality of discourses. Users may internalise implicit frames more easily without questioning the incentivisation of entertainment or the normalising effect of collective action. The world of meanings in social media impacts on individuals more readily than the mass media as it bears claims to everydayness and infiltrates into the everyday life practices of users. In the relationship between digitisation and discourse, one cannot ignore the existing ideological and economic relations and the structural characteristics of technology, despite the valuable opportunities the participatory culture provides for resistance discourses. In addition to this, online and offline discourses have a formative effect on each other. As a result, the presence of discourse is independent of the media, but it can gain in strength by being influenced by the structural characteristics of media genres. SM-CDS calls for such considerations across various topical analyses in CDS (KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018), including digital misogyny or racism.

CDS, gender, and digital feminist movements The socially constructed notion of gender is a product of power relations and controlled by discourses. According to Butler (1993: 210), gender is a discursive construction and discursive body produced by social practices. Male-dominated discourses position women unequally and put pressure on women to internalise the social gender roles attributed to them. CDS aims to analyse the implicit or explicit hegemony, discrimination, power, and control relations arising in the use of language, and gender studies are positioned at the intersection of these rela-

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tions. With the help of research on CDS, examining the differences and similarities of the meanings produced by men and women expressing themselves in everyday life is significant for gender studies (Goodwin 1980). Lazar (2007: 2) emphasises the need for a feminist point of view in CDS and draws attention to Cameron’s (1992, as cited in Lazar 2007) argument that: “CDS needs an explicit feminist label to question the whole scholarly objective bias of linguistics and to show how assumptions and practices of linguistics are implicated in patriarchal ideology and oppression.” Feminist CDS aims to reveal the inequalities that women are exposed to because of social gender roles. It makes the ideological discourses on gender visible and focuses on the construction of male-dominated discourses, resistance to these discourses, and criticising the reproduction of sexist discourses (Lazar 2007: 11). Discourses of gender on social media have become an increasing concern. Social media offers opportunities for women to come together and organise to resist patriarchal hegemonies and an unequal social order (Ghaffari 2020). Various digital feminist movements have emerged worldwide around the central foci of social media, gender, and discursive struggles. It should be emphasised that these cyberactivist movements, with the most widespread being #MeToo,1 have had an essential impact across mainstream media and academic studies. Digital feminist movements have been referred to as hashtag feminism as they come together (Mendes et al. 2018: 237). Cyberactivism, feminist collaboration, and solidarity on social media manifest themselves as new forms of feminist activism but bring many obstacles and problems. According to common values gathered under themes with hashtags, Twitter activism brings users together but provides only a temporary and superficial collectivity (Zappavigna 2012). Virtual communities can be explained by homophily, where people pay attention to similar ones (Lynn et al. 2020). Colleoni et al. (2014) analysed Twitter as an echo chamber rather than a public sphere because of exclusionary discourse tactics. According to Castells (2015: 146), the effort to define activist movements on Twitter as successful or not points to a productivist vision of social action because social transformation takes time, expecting concrete results immediately is related to capitalist logic. 1. On 5 October 2017, The New York Times reported that dozens of women had accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual abuse over more than 30 years (Kantor and Twohey 2017). Alyssa Milano tweeted on 15 October 2017: “If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote, “me too”. As a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.” After millions of people started using the #MeToo hashtag, it spread to dozens of other languages. Social media solidarity turned into street protests, encouraged women to start legal processes, and led to the disclosure of many molesters and rapists in Hollywood (Chicago Tribune 2018).

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In their essay, Mendes et al. (2018) summarise the field of digital feminist activism, compiling the possibilities and threats offered by hashtag feminism. In many themes such as solidarity, consciousness-raising, empathy, sharing traumas, and resistance, participants have stated that they found hashtag feminism useful and it made a difference to their lives. Social media movements have been very functional in understanding that what women are experiencing is not a personal but a social problem. On the way to seeking legal rights, social media encourages women to tell their stories. These examples take social change about gender inequality one step closer, promise hope, and promote feminist activism through the newly afforded spaces of discursive power online. On the other hand, women’s resistance to gender inequalities encounters negative backlashes such as misogynistic discourses, hate speech, and trolling (KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018). As Mendes et al. (2018) point out, 72% of their participants have been exposed to trolling, hate speech, or online abuse. The same mechanism amplifies spreading symbolic violence against women, deepening the current gender and power gaps. The reality and memory that users collectively build through social networks can be transformed into a targeted site where hate groups reproduce misogyny. Hatred brought together the members of a hate group and built a shared identity (Cortese 2006: 3). Twitter, which contributes to resistance and organising social movements like #MeToo, can also become a platform where sexist discourses turn into a facilitator for misogynistic discourses where hate groups organise to intensify the pressure on women. The issue should not be positioned only between digital feminist activism and sexist hate speech or online misogyny. Another discursive issue needs to be considered, one which works in a more implicit way and inspires this research: women themselves also inadvertently reproduce sexist content while supporting cyberactivist movements. Sometimes users unwittingly reproduce discriminatory and dominant discourses internalised while resisting misogyny. For example, while reacting against sexual harassment, women can use sexist swearing and words degrading to the female body. It is an example of micro-power and docile bodies that are tamed by ideological apparatuses. These discourses are implicit and latent, and precisely in the research field of SM-CDS. Academic research on #MeToo focuses on issues such as hashtag feminism, empathy, organisation, cyberactivism, collective action, engaging men in #MenToo, breaking the culture of silence or awareness campaigns. Rarely do studies question digital feminist movements from a critical point of view. Discussions of #MeToo in discourse studies focus on the discourses produced by mainstream media about the #MeToo campaign. Studies on the news in mainstream media are critical studies that try to reveal whether mass media support

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#MeToo or how and in what way it is manipulated. However, there is not enough research aimed at critically revealing the implicit sexist codes in the discourses of women supporting digital feminist movements. It may be because global movements such as #MeToo have fewer examples in this regard; local cyberactivist movements in conservative societies have much more attention-grabbing examples about supporters’ discourses like the #SenDeAnlat2 (you tell it too) movement in Turkey. In conservative societies, efforts to remain anonymous and self-censor are more common among social movement supporters. Women themselves reproduce discourses that belong to masculine language. At this point, resistance to the patriarchal system and the reproduction of sexist discourses are intertwined. The sociological conditions of society determine the intensity of this relationship. For this reason, comparing local and global campaigns is seen as necessary for this study. According to a Global Gender Gap Report (World Economic Forum 2020), Turkey ranks 130 among 149 countries in gender equality; 49.8% of the population in Turkey are women; only 28.9% are employed, and the illiterate female population is 8% (Tuik 2019). The data provide insights into the visibility of women in the public sphere. In masculine cultures, women are identified within a private space, while men are identified within the public sphere. Even though the private sphere seems to be apart from the political sphere, it is politicised with the help of unequal social roles and symbolic violence. The inequality between males and females has been legitimised through the culture of namus3 and the discourse of 2. Özgecan Aslan, a 20-year-old university student, was violently murdered by a minibus driver as she resisted a rape attempt in Mersin in February 2015. The murder of Özgecan Aslan caused significant reactions and protests across the country (Girit 2015). On 14 February 2015, Idıl Elveris, an academician at Istanbul Bilgi University, tweeted as follows: “Can you use the sentence beginning, because I am a woman and the hashtag sendeanlat to write examples of things you experienced only because you were a woman.” After this tweet, women started to share their sexual harassment and assault stories by using the #SenDeAnlat hashtag (Davidson 2015). The hashtag quickly became a trending topic, and with the participation of celebrities in the movement, it had begun to become news in the mainstream media. The movement turned into street protests, and the SenDeAnlat Platform was set up that allowed women to share their stories of harassment and violence. At Change.org, an online petition was launched to demand the most severe punishment for Özgecan’s murderers and the end of femicides. Four political parties in parliament were called on to enact legal regulations by a petition. The “Özgecan Law” envisaged the abolition of good conduct times and the concept of consent in child marriage (Change.org 2015). 3. Namus is a sexual honour that refers to the physical and moral qualities that women ought to have. The sexuality of a woman is controlled through the namus that women have to protect these qualities all through her life. Men’s names are always determined by the namus of their mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters. If namus is stained, men are responsible for cleaning it

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fıtrat (nature). Morality is a determinative element in collectivist societies; personal rights and freedoms are at the forefront in individualistic societies. Because of the decisiveness of honour and morality in Turkey, creating self-governing subjects works. This male-dominated system is also legitimised by law.4 In addition, the language of media produces misogynistic discourses systematically. Under these conditions, social networks are the only place where activists can organise but not go very far. Morozov (2010) says that “one can have organising without organisations, but one cannot have revolutions without revolutionaries”. Women internalise male-dominated discourses, and the sexist order permeates women’s everyday life. This study aims to reveal implicit sexist codes of women’s discourses on social media in the intercultural context. Women themselves also inadvertently use sexist language while telling their sexual harassment narratives and supporting cyberactivist feminist movements. This situation is significant to point out the roots of micro-power. On the other hand, society’s cultural and historical background is the essential formative element of sexist discourses. Revealing the cultural and social roots of gender inequalities could be possible by conducting cross-cultural comparison research. In this study, two digital feminist movements on Twitter are chosen for examination: #MeToo as a global example and #SenDeAnlat as a local one. Hashtags determine the study sample, and the tweets were drawn from Twitter in the first weeks of the movements. The periods examined are 14.2.2015 – 20.2.2015 for #SenDeAnlat and 15.10.2017 – 21.10.2017 for #MeToo. The detailed search tool was used to obtain data from Twitter. Dates and hashtags were entered into the search tool, and tweets found retrospectively were saved and analysed.

Analysis and discussion Everything that male dominance dictates to women, from using sexist language to blaming them as a source of sexual harassment, hides in women’s discourses implicitly. These implicit codes were classified5 according to the discourse

by punishing women. These punishments can include femicide that are extreme in the worldwide patriarchal violence against women (Sev’er and Yurdakul 2001: 973–976). 4. Until 2004, sex crimes were covered by “crimes against society”. In the case of femicides, the father or brother has been applied time off for good behaviour. The law turned into a part of masculine domination when it considered the crimes against women as committed to both family and public morality. 5. The study by Yeliz Dede-Özdemir named “The Re-construction of Sexist Discourse in Narratives of Sexual Harassment: #SenDeAnlat” guided this classification.

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themes determined. Besides, even though gender inequality is a global problem, cultural differences are important too. Thus, the Turkish case is examined according to themes determined and comparing it with the global case through cultural differences.

Using man-made language: Sexist swearing and degrading female bodies Language always reflects the thoughts and attitudes of society (Schulz 1975: 64). Males created language, and women express themselves in male terms. In Spender’s (1987: 12) words, “women remain outsiders, borrowers of the language”, and they use a language that is not of their own making. Especially, offensive expressions disclose this inequality because most swear words are sexist and involve the derogation of women. Sexist swearing is one of the tools of male dominance over the female body (Dede-Özdemir 2015). In addition to sexist swearing, female body-commodifying words such as “giving” or “being dirty” have been used by women in tweets. The word giving is produced by the mentality of seeing the female body as a pleasure object for males, and it is more common in the #SenDeAnlat hashtag. Some women have identified themselves as dirty, disgusting, unloveable, or non-innocent. In such statements, being dirty is associated with losing one’s virginity. Seeing it as a loss is the result of sexist discourses that glorify virginity to control female sexuality. Expressions like “my virginity was taken from me” are only used on the #MeToo hashtag. Turkish survivors have avoided articulating virginity. They feel stained, excluded from society, and tend to be silent because of the concept of namus in Turkey. These thoughts about virginity extend to sexual morality, and women apply self-censorship when talking about these issues. The examined tweets point out that both sexist swearing and degrading words are strongly internalised, even by women. They use man-made language even when they stand against sexual violence. The findings support Spender’s (1987: 12) comment: “This monopoly over language is one of the means by which males have ensured their own primacy … This primacy is perpetuated while women continue to use the language which we have inherited.”

Recirculating unequal social roles According to Bourdieu (1991), power is symbolic violence that imparts the ideas of dominated power, and it is more powerful than physical violence. It condemns women to the status of symbolic objects in the patriarchal system through discourse. In the #SenDeAnlat movement, the tweets of women who internalise unequal social roles describe man as protector and woman as needing protection.

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These tweets are the expressions of individuals exposed to symbolic violence through gendered sociality. The male is attributed the role of protecting the private space and the women in his family for namus. In comparison, the protector and punisher role of the male is seen in the #SenDeAnlat hashtag more than in #MeToo. Examples of Turkish women’s tweets include statements that glorify the existence and power of their brother or father: “Once my brother beat the man who was stalking me. I am very lucky to have a brother” or “When the men of the family are away, we put a man’s shoes in front of the door.” The social dynamics that allot a protective role to men teach women to make sacrifices for the honour of the family. Turkish women endure sexual harassment and assaults in silence so as not to get the men of the family into trouble. For example: “Being a woman is: repressing what you have been living through to keep your family away from a difficult situation.” Turkish women have concerns about getting their brothers or fathers into trouble or staining the namus of the family. At the same time, tweets under the #MeToo hashtag reflect concerns over upsetting their loved ones with their painful stories. It means that the pressure on survivors is moral, not social, in Turkey.

Victim-blaming: Physical appearance, dress and drink seen as provocative What motivated millions of people to engage in a massive reaction to Özgecan in a country where women are killed every day? According to the concept of the belief in a just world in Psychology, people believe that bad things can happen to evil people who deserve it (Lerner 1980: 11). People feel safe with this belief. Nevertheless, this belief is shaken in some cases, and people cannot cope with unjust situations because they just remind people that this can happen to them and all their cause-and-effect relationships collapse. People seek to establish a new cause-andeffect relationship to relieve their anxiety and become inclined to victim-blame (Altekin 2015). Certain behaviours of women, such going out at night, choice of lipstick colours, and skirt lengths, are perceived as causes of rape and violence. However, in the case of Özgecan, Turkish society could not cope with this murder because it could not find anything to victim-blame. Özgecan was going home from school, called her family to say that she was on her way, and was murdered while resisting rape. Therefore, society could not blame the victim and deny that it was a problem with society instead of the victim, and so it caused great public indignation. However, a victim-blaming culture implicitly manifested itself in the tweets of women’s narratives. Survivors tend to blame themselves in a male-dominated regime, and the tweets of survivors reflect this tendency. Sexual harassment narratives show that victims or survivors are held responsible for sexual violence because of their dress

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or behaviour. Getting drunk, wearing mini-skirts, and going out late at night are the most common reasons for victim-blaming. Of course, ths is supported and naturalised socially. In this study, tweets in which survivors questioned themselves as sources of sexual harassment and assault are grouped into three categories: physical appearance, dress, and drink.

Physical appearance Some women see their beauty and attractiveness as the reason for being harassed. This thought is the product of discourses that see sexual violence and sexual desire as the same. Gendered discourses that exaggerate men’s sex drive and reconcile it with the nature of being a male legitimise sexual violence under the guise of desire. In these discourses in women’s tweets, they consider themselves to be the target of sexual harassment and assault because of their physical appearance. Looking like Westerners is seen as increasing the risk of sexual harassment in the #SenDeAnlat hashtag. For example: “In touristic regions, people treat me as a tourist who is looking to make love with Turkish men just because I am lightskinned.” In the Islamist gender regime, the European woman has become a symbol of corruption and immorality. “Afshar contends that the Iranian state perceives the veil as ‘protection not limitation’ and a sign of respect for women to protect them from becoming a sex object, as is the case for women in the West” (Ozcetin 2015: 30). Women who consider beauty and attractiveness to be a disadvantage define masculinity as an advantage with the words “being like a man” or “being a tomboy”.

Dress Another element seen as provocative is one’s dress. In the Foucauldian approach, dress is a tool for controlling gendered bodies, and becomes a discursive practice. One’s dress code, which is the carrier of sexual morality patterns, shapes women’s ways of being in public spaces. Especially in Turkey, the dress and mobility of women in public spaces are influenced by Islamist rhetoric (Secor 2002). Women are seen as responsible for attacks against them because they are condemned for dressing immodestly. Even though the dominance over women is revealed in different forms, dress is a phenomenon around the world.6 Hence, 6. As an example, in Ireland, the rapist of a 17-year-old woman was acquitted, citing her lacy underwear as a sign of her consent. In response to this decision, women began to share their underwear photos on Twitter in the #ThisIsNotConsent hashtag. In another example, in Australia, a jury did not find the rapist guilty because the survivor’s jeans were tight and could not be removed without her help (Goldsmith 2010). There are numerous victim-blaming court

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power relations have constructed dress codes as a tool for control over the female body and has a symbolic violence element. It is seen that women tend to define their clothes in their tweets telling sexual violence stories. In some of those tweets, women are surprised that they were harassed despite wearing clothes following the dress code, and they use statements such as “properly dressed”, “uncovered body”, or “wearing a headscarf ”. These tweets point out that women internalise and normalise the imposed dress code. Women emphasise that their clothes are not provocative and reproduce the discourse that they can cause sexual harassment if they do not comply with the dress code. In particular, there is much more dress emphasis in tweets in #SenDeAnlat. Women are trying to say that they are protecting their namus while emphasising their dress and recirculating the phenomenon of namus.

Drink Another element of victim-blaming is the alcohol consumption of women. There is an understanding all over the world that if the survivor drank before she was harassed, the woman is found guilty. Her drinking has already shown signs of a woman’s immodesty or immorality in cases of sexual harassment and assaults in Turkey. Therefore in #SenDeAnlat, drinking is not even discussed much in tweets, unlike dress. However, in the #MeToo hashtag, alcohol and drugs are elements more frequently discussed as being provocative. For example, a survivor defended herself as follows: “I did not drink or do drugs. I followed all the rules they taught me.” If the differences between women following the dress code in #SenDeAnlat and women who do not drink in #MeToo are evaluated, it is seen that different tools are used for the same dominance. Each society uses its gender code to pursue a victim-blaming culture and create self-controlled docile bodies. The symbolic violence that operates through morality in #SenDeAnlat and socially in #MeToo is used as a biopolitical tool all over the patriarchal world.

Adaptation to the sexist order: Advice on how to avoid sexual harassment The majority of tweets in #SenDeAnlat are about women’s ways of protecting themselves from sexual harassment in the public space. Strategies for protecting decisions around the world. However, there are also cases of sexual violence in the public sphere; men think that they have the right to punish women because of their dress. For example, in Istanbul, the metropolis of Turkey, an assailant attacked a young woman in a minibus saying, “Are you not ashamed to dress in mini shorts during Ramadan?” (Dogan News Agency 2017).

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themselves mean ways of adapting to a male-dominant system. While these tweets reveal the intensity of sexual harassment in the public space in Turkey, their content shows how women internalise this patriarchal system and feel helpless. Women develop a variety of strategies such as defusing the assailant (“I carry pepper spray in the most reachable part of my bag”), losing the stalker (“Not turning the lights on after getting home to make sure they do not see which flat I live in”), strategies for getting a taxi (“Pretending to talk to my father in the cab”) or a bus (“Checking if there is another girl on the bus when reaching the last stop”), not wearing headphones (“I have to take my headphones off at night to hear footsteps”), protecting one’s body and obeying a dress code (“A country where a woman cannot bend and tie her shoelaces”), and ignoring gaze (“Walking eyes down to avoid dirty looks”) for use in spaces such as work, public transportation, and streets where everyday life happens. All of these methods are women’s efforts to adapt to a sexist system. These efforts, which have become part of women’s everyday lives, mainly point out mobility limitations in the public sphere. Even though the modern urban woman has gone beyond the boundaries of the private sphere, she is forced to be cautious against threats in the public sphere. Unfortunately, the gendered society teaches women to blame themselves, also not to expect help. The ways of problem-solving belong to the masculine mindset, which creates these unequal sexist conditions, they do not contain any solutions; moreover, they isolate women even more.

Spiral of silence or “name and shame!” Women are seen as the source of harassment and socially excluded by stigmatisation. Thus, the process of adaptation to masculine society gives rise to a spiral of silence. In #SenDeAnlat, even as women resisted sexual violence, they avoided telling their stories in detail or preferred anonymous Twitter accounts. The system, which considers harassment and rape as a stain on the honour of women, makes women stay silent with fear and shame. For example: “My biggest fear in life is to be raped. Not even to be killed!” Of course, there is fear also in #MeToo, but in #SenDeAnlat, fear is rooted in shame and namus. Another feeling that feeds being silent and learned helplessness is the perception of harassment as part of life. The #RapeCulture hashtag emphasises harassment and rape as an event that occurs frequently enough to turn it into a culture. There is not even a single tweet where the perpetrator is disclosed in the SenDeAnlat hashtag. However, in the #MeToo example, the “Name it! Shame it!” understanding is common, and some survivors told their narratives in detail and mentioned their perpetrators and ongoing legal processes. According to Herman (1997), recovering from traumas such as sexual harassment and abuse has three

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psychological stages: safety and stabilisation, remembrance and mourning, reconnection and integration. The process, which turns victims into survivors, can take years, and sharing the trauma plays a vital role in recovery. While social support and a fair legal system can be helpful for recovery, social exclusion and unfair court provisions cause learned helplessness and create a spiral of silence. Even though incest news is published in newspapers every day, there is no incest story in #SenDeAnlat. Nevertheless, it is possible to come across survivors’ tweets in #MeToo with such expressions as “by a family member … by mother … by father … by brother”. Finally, according to Foucault (2008), nationalist and modern discourses accept the heterosexual subject as a norm. Individuals who are not seen as ideal citizens of the nation are left open to being murdered. Exclusionary discourses are produced about LGBTI individuals. #MeToo shows that the most marginalised group consists of black women. In tweets, it has been expressed that men find sexual harassment easier against black women.

Conclusion There is a dialectical relationship between discourse and social structure. CDS helps to investigate the relation between text and power against inequalities such as gender, which is also a discursive practice. Social media have changed social meaning-making and allow users to express themselves and participate in the public sphere independent of time and space limitations. Thus, forms of collective action and activism have been transformed. As Foucault says, modern power is not imposed on individuals from above, it is produced from below with microtechniques; social media has produced new micro-techniques to spread the ideology of power by transforming each audience into a content producer. This study has examined the digital discourses produced in hashtag feminism movements by critically looking at the relationship between social media and discourse; and it has tried to reveal the implicit sexist discourses of women by comparing two campaigns and connecting the digital and social dimensions. SM-CDA was applied to two activist movements, #SenDeAnlat and #MeToo. First of all, it can be said that social media facilitates revealing women’s thoughts that they have not expressed before, with the interaction and participatory features of social media. Social media offers broader opportunities to understand women’s thoughts under the influence of male dominance and the reflections of these thoughts on everyday life practices. Big data provided by social media bring to light survivors’ discourses, as no media have ever done before. Therefore, social media is also significant in terms of CDA to offer new ways to

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access data. Likewise, the multimedia features of social media increase the technological opportunities for storytelling and allow women to participate in the public sphere. Social media that brings women from different social, economic, and cultural backgrounds has provided the opportunity for digital activism that caused street protests, social awareness projects, and legal regulations. Even when women struggle against sexual violence, their tweets can inadvertently reproduce male-dominated discourses from a critical perspective. The discourses found in this study are as follows: (1) using sexist swearing and degrading the female body; (2) recirculating unequal social roles and defining men as protector and punisher; (3) victim-blaming through physical appearance, dress codes, and drink; (4) developing strategies to protect themselves against sexual harassment in the public space for adaptation to a sexist order; (5) being silent or anonymous in sexual harassment narratives so as not to be socially excluded by stigmatisation. The discourses grouped in the first three themes are elements of symbolic violence perpetrated by a male-dominated society against women. Social media intensifies this symbolic violence, mainly through hate groups. All of the possibilities to organise expressed by Rheingold for virtual communities become a threat that expands online misogyny by hate groups. Likewise, women who intend to resist gender inequality spread these symbolic violence elements unwittingly in social media. The last two themes indicate that although there are numerous tweets about women’s strategies for avoiding sexual harassment in the public space, they are quite implicit about sexual harassment narratives in #SenDeAnlat. This disproportion reveals that sexual harassment exists, but women prefer not to tell their personal stories. Both their strategies in the public space and being silent on social media are consequences of the adaptation effort of survivors to male-dominated everyday life. Another reason for the spiral of silence, apart from fear of stigmatisation and social exclusion, is digital surveillance on social media. Quite a number users only like or retweet the sharings of others. They apply self-censorship because of social media surveillance. It is both problematic and expected for women to internalise and reproduce discourses of the male-dominated regime. These discourses deepen social inequalities and intensify the male-dominated gender system. In comparing local and global movements, implicit sexist codes in women’s discourses often appear in conservative societies’ movements. Of course, the research results, such as man-made language, victim-blaming, or being silent cover all women globally, but these are seen more in Turkey and feed more on moral issues, not social ones. Moreover, in #MeToo, the spiral of silence is often replaced by a name and shame culture. This situation shows that even social media solidarity cannot break taboos in Turkey and draws attention to the differences between cultures.

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Social media carries extensions of existing gender discourses. Aside from the idea that intercultural interaction will be at the highest level in this global village, as seen in this study, gender discourses mostly remain within the boundaries of local discourses. The domestic cultures settled in societies for centuries are still implicit in subtexts. Moreover, the fluidity of social media helps to reproduce and recirculate dominant gender discourses and reconstruct the behavioural patterns of self-controlled docile bodies. Besides, this study reveals the need for SM-CDS by pointing to the effect of social media on discourse.

Post-script developments During the period between the critical discourse analysis conducted in this study and the publication process, there have been some changes to digital feminist activism in Turkey. In 2020, after the Turkish author Hasan Ali Toptaş was accused of sexual harassment on Twitter, the sexual harassment of many authors began to be disclosed by women with the MeToo hashtag. İbrahim Çolak, who was among these names, committed suicide after being named. With this suicide news, digital feminist movements became a topic more discussed in Turkey. When these developments in 2020 are considered with this study, the discourses of Turkish women show some differences compared to the SenDeAnlat movement in 2015. When comparing #SenDeAnlat and #MeToo within the study, one of the differences revealed between local and global campaigns is that “naming and shaming” was replaced by a spiral of silence or very indirect implications in conservative societies. When the differences in Turkish women’s discourses between 2015 and 2020 are examined, it is seen that they prefer #MeToo as a hashtag and their tendency to disclose the perpetrators with their names has increased. This change is interpreted as a transformative effect of global movements on local contributors.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2009. What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Altekin, Serap. 2015. “Şiddet rastgele yaşanmaz, planlı, sistematik ve politiktir.” Interview by Nihan Bora. Diken. Accessed 24 February 2015. Barton, David and Lee, Carmen. 2013. Language Online: Investigating Digital Texts and Practices. Abingdon: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London: Routledge.

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A journal of impossible things Tweeted discourses of gendered digital fandom on the thirteenth doctor and #NotMyDoctor hashtag Meredith L. Pruden

Kennesaw State University

In 2017, the cult programme Doctor Who announced its Thirteenth Doctor – classically trained Jodie Whittaker. This new regeneration (i.e., recasting) of an iconic, and consummately upper crust, British character follows twelve white male Doctors into the bigger-on-the-inside blue police box to traverse space and time saving the Whoniverse. Fans have always viewed new Doctors with scepticism, but this new female Doctor seemed impossible for fans. Was this impossibility a rupture with Whovian lore or a reflection of heteropatriarchal social norms? This chapter takes a feminist media and fan studies perspective and employs social media critical discourse analysis to examine the #NotMyDoctor hashtag that trended on Twitter following the announcement. It finds three themes: trolling the haters, the anti-PC police, and a Whovian cult of true womanhood.

Introduction First launched in 1963, Doctor Who is an award-winning BBC sci-fi spectacular and the Guinness World Record Holder for Most Prolific Science-Fiction TV Series (by episodes) of all time (“Most Prolific Science-Fiction TV Series (by episodes) | Guinness World Records” n.d.). It is among the longest-running programmes on television across genres with 42 years on the small screen since its inception, despite taking a break from 1989 to 2005 (Chaney n.d.). To put that in perspective, America’s longest-running sitcom, longest-running animated series, and longest-running scripted series, The Simpsons, has run for 32 years – a full decade less than Doctor Who (McNamee n.d.; “‘The Simpsons’ and Other Longest-Running Prime-Time Scripted Series” USA Today n.d.). Not only does Doctor Who have a long and rich history on the BBC (and across the pond on

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BBC America since its reboot, which claimed a ratings record for the channel), the programme may also be the United Kingdom’s most monumental cultural export (staff n.d.). More than 75 countries across six continents broadcast the show’s 50th anniversary special in November 2013, which set another Guinness World Record for the Biggest TV Drama Simulcast at that time (Guinness World Records 2013).1 Generations of Whovians (the term for fans of the show) across the globe not only watch the programme but also purchase a variety of mass marketed Doctor Who merchandise, including miniature replicas of the famous TARDIS, coffee mugs, action figures, and all manner of apparel, which has helped make Doctor Who one of the consistently top earning programme brands for the BBC (“BBC Worldwide Delivers over £ 200m to BBC for a Third Year Running” n.d.). It is, by all accounts, a boundless cult classic spanning nations, languages, and cultures. The programme even has its own museum on the waterfront in Cardiff, Wales. Throughout the programme’s half-century history, there have been 12 Doctors. Each one has been a white British man, and most have boasted their own action figure; however, none have warranted a partnership with one of the bestselling toys in global history before now. The show announced its Thirteenth Doctor in July 2017 and introduced her to the world near the end of the December 2017 Christmas special Twice Upon a Time in which, it is worth noting, she was promptly ejected into the ether by her self-aware time and space travelling TARDIS – presumably because it no longer recognized her in female form. For the first time in the series’ history, The Doctor regenerated as a woman – the classically-trained British actress Jodie Whittaker. Although Doctor Who has featured female Time Lords (also known as Time Ladies) before, it seems the creative team has more explicitly been testing the waters for fan support of a female Doctor since 2014 when it introduced its first female Master (the Doctor’s old friend and long-time nemesis) for a recurring role. The series also introduced its first openly bisexual recurring character in 2005, its first Black companion in 2006 and its first lesbian companion in early 2016, which indicates a further pendulum swing toward diversity and inclusivity on a show that historically has been very heteronormative, very white, and created in one of the world’s most prolific imperial powers (Plunkett 2016). Despite the historically problematic underrepresentation of racial and ethnic diversity in Doctor Who mythology, there has always been an implicit air of gender fluidity and mystery around the character of The Doctor and around Time Lord regeneration more generally. Early Doctors, while cast as stereotypical English gentlemen, were also at various times written as flamboyant or androgynously genteel heroes (see, for example, the Sixth Doctor played by actor Colin 1. Game of Thrones beat this record in 2015 and currently holds the title.

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Baker). Additionally, actor Matt Smith’s eleventh iteration of The Doctor alluded to another piece of Whoniverse ethos, that of the Corsair, who was a Time Lord friend of The Doctor and regenerated as a woman on more than one occasion (Pinault 2012). Following from this, there seemed to be precedent for this newest regeneration as a Time Lady, but the new female lead has nevertheless received mixed reviews among fans – many of whom seem to view The Doctor as a consummately straight, white British bloke (Placido 2017). In fact, at one time, even longtime showrunner Steven Moffat (2010–2017) stated publicly that fans weren’t ready for a female Doctor (Caron 2013). On the day the BBC announced Whittaker as its Thirteenth Doctor, 16 July 2017, the hashtag #NotMyDoctor went viral across social media, and comment boards on related articles from major news outlets erupted in Whovian fan wars. Although many comments were complimentary, vitriolic anti-feminist discourses were also prevalent and reminiscent of the mediated discourses of misogyny and racism shared online in response to the re-release of Ghostbusters in July 2016 with an all-female cast and the U.S. nationwide women’s-only screenings of Wonder Woman in June 2017 (Blodgett and Salter 2018). Of course, Whovians are almost always sceptical toward each new Doctor, and this is not the first time #NotMyDoctor has been used in recent years – though it has never gained much traction in the past and has not before centred around critical discourses of race and gender. This is because fans ultimately tend to get attached to each new Doctor with the running joke being that Whovians end up loving them just as they leave the show. This regeneration feels different – and far more volatile. As one male Twitter user responded to the #NotMyDoctor cyberhate: “Episode 1 ‘#NotMyDoctor’ the Doctor arrives in 2017 and finally decides the human race isn’t worth saving anymore #DrWho13.” This chapter explores discursive constructions by fans on Twitter related to the first female Doctor in the BBC sci-fi series Doctor Who by analysing posts using the hashtag #NotMyDoctor during the day of the announcement. In so doing, the chapter sheds light on the gendered and hierarchical nature of digital sci-fi fandom, as well as on Twitter as a male-dominated social media platform where discourses of gendered harassment of women have been prolific (Esposito and Zollo 2021; Ghaffari 2020; KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018). The findings contribute to the body of research on social media discourses of gendered hostility by integrating insights from feminist media and fan studies, specifically around online fandom cultures. The study also argues that existing notions of intratextual expertise may be incomplete in the analysis of such digital discourses of fandom.

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The Whoniverse Doctor Who has been studied sporadically throughout the years, beginning primarily with the rise of the Birmingham School of cultural studies in the 1980s, but Jowett (2014: 77) notes a gap in the literature around the programme and gender, suggesting there is a lack of research in this area and that the show’s “creators have no philosophy about trying to represent a more equal society”. Until recently, very little has changed in that respect. Despite a lack of scholarship around gender and Doctor Who, the programme has consistently addressed historical problems in imaginative ways. According to Charles (2008: 453), for example, the programme’s formative years “were often characterised by a yearning for British imperial dominance, as its elderly Edwardian hero turned back time to patrol the universe,” but the show later replaced this imperialistic nostalgia with “irony and self-parody”. In large part, however, this imperialist tradition continued into the show’s 2005 reboot – often called “New Who” by fans and commentators. New Who sparked near immediate controversy with the introduction of a bisexual male companion, Captain Jack, and opened the doors for a new wave of Doctor Who scholarship that investigated fundamentalism/ idealism (Charles 2008), representations of the threat of The Other (Dixit 2012), race (Gupta 2013), class (Haslop 2016), digital fandom (Hills and Garde-Hansen 2017; Pearson 2010), gendered perceptions of scientific competence (Orthia and Morgain 2016), archetypes and the modern hero myth (Stannard 1988), paratextual memory (Hills and Garde-Hansen 2017) and gender (Jowett 2014). Much of this work has found Doctor Who to be both lacking in meaningful representations of marginalised identities and yet also cutting edge. In line with key notions about critical discourse studies (Fairclough and Wodak 1997), central to all of this work, however, is the notion that studying popular culture allows researchers to “understand how this common sense is produced and to note the circulation of meanings in world politics and culture” because the science fiction genre allows us to imagine our world from varying perspectives while focusing attention on how we may best cope with a changing world (Dixit 2012: 290). Analysis of the production of common sense (i.e., legitimation processes) is a main aspiration in critical discourse studies where analysis of meaning making across content and practices is a key entry point (KhosraviNik 2020). Noting science fiction production has been an almost entirely male field, Penley (1994) also acknowledges that female fans have – in some instances (e.g., Star Trek) – been integral to sustaining programmes even when expressing disappointment with portrayals of female characters. Interestingly, Doctor Who’s first producer, Verity Lambert, was one of only a few working female producers at that time. This has not, according to Jowett (2014), shielded the programme

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from representation challenges around inequitable depictions and production related to intersecting identities, including race, ethnicity, ability, class, or gender. Some argue that the world is changing, that feminists and multi-culturalists have won. However, the discursive constructions of Doctor Who fans Tweeted out in 280-character jabs indicate this sentiment may not be quite so straightforward. At least in the Twittersphere and in the case of the Thirteenth Doctor, digital fan reception and the discourses surrounding it may not be as borderless as the circulation of the show itself. It may, in fact, be constrained by ongoing racialised misogyny in the digital and material worlds – as well as in their entanglement.

Digital fandom, cult TV & gender Science fiction fandom is traceable to the community forums built up around Gernsbeck’s Amazing Stories (Jenkins 1992). These “letter columns” allowed fans, writers, and editors to share and communicate with one another, ultimately resulting in the birth of science fiction as a unique genre all of its own and encouraging a culture of fan and professional sharing that largely exists outside the industry’s textual producers (Jenkins 1992). In this environment, fans derive “discursive and pleasurable possibilities for social interaction based on shared enthusiasm for particular shows” (Byerly and Ross 2006: 58). While (Jenkins 1992) sees modern fandom as a primarily female endeavour – a rupture from traditionally maledominated fandom – he also points out that male and female fans may read media texts differently, with female fans drawing on affect and personal experiences and male fans focusing more on authorship and credibility. Additionally, producers, showrunners, and industry executives are less interested in fans and more interested in audiences, which are gendered and raced. As (Meehan 2006) states, prime time television slots (where shows like Doctor Who air) have historically assumed a white male commodity audience, whereas daytime programming, which demands less attention and commands lower advertising rates, was reserved for so-called niche audiences, including women and minorities. Twitter is a modern-day letter column on which fans can easily find, aggregate and communicate about their favourite topics and shows via hashtags. Studies have found that Twitter is a “technology for fandom” where people publicly perform fan belonging (Highfield, Harrington and Bruns 2013:n.p.), construct fan identities (Ghaffari 2020) and perform fan belonging around major television events (Highfield, Harrington and Bruns 2013). However, there is a participation gap in which self-esteem, self-efficacy, informal learning opportunities, and relationship networks are unevenly distributed among pre-existing socioeconomic categories (Jenkins, Ito, and boyd 2015). In other words, “both face-to-face and

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digital fandoms are as ridden with hierarchies, cliques, and conflict as all social organizations” (Pearson 2010: 93). In fact, in some ways, these hierarchies or “exclusionary forms of social and cultural capital, your identity and who you know” are far more important in these spaces than they often are in the material world (Jenkins, Ito, and boyd 2015: 19). It almost goes without saying today that social media are not the great democratisers early scholars believed they might be (Herring 2003). In other words, social media are neither wholly collaborative and empowering nor are they entirely conflictual and disempowering (Herring 2003; Marwick 2019). However, social media, including Twitter, are gendered technologies that operate within a “deeply gendered context that privileges ‘masculine’ behaviours and closely polices female self-presentation”, thereby encouraging some kinds of online communication while discouraging others in ways that both mirror and construct gender (Marwick 2013: 60). On the one hand, girls and women have organised around hashtag awareness campaigns to intervene in violence against women through community building (Berridge and Portwood-Stacer 2015; Bowles Eagle 2015; Keller, Mendes, and Ringrose 2018; Rentschler 2014: 2015); on the other, the use of hashtags risks over-simplification of the issue, as well as networked harassment or targeted violence (Berridge and Portwood-Stacer 2015), like that seen during #GamerGate (Massanari 2017; Blodgett 2020). In the case of online fandoms, users organizing around hashtags also demonstrate this tension (Blodgett 2020). One way in which this occurs is through the performance of intratextual expertise of cult television in ways that can make space for marginalised voices but, nevertheless, often reinforces the normative social order (Hills 2015). Intratextual expertise is the process by which fans read individual episodes against other content from the same series, and it is prevalent amongst Whovians (Hills 2015). In the context of digital social spaces like fan wikis and Twitter, it becomes a sort of discursively constructed “collective intelligence” (Jenkins 2006; Hills 2015). In fact, as Banks (2010: 234) has argued, it may be that online spaces and the discursively constructed collective intelligence they house are simply a “new frontier for spreading hate”. More recently, Jane (2017) has also offered evidence as to the discursive significance of gendered cyberhate. Gendered cyberhate, which is disproportionately directed at women, is of specific concern when one considers that “online harassment can quickly become a team sport, with posters trying to outdo each other” and competing “to be the most offensive, the most abusive” (Citron 2014: 5). However, gendered cyberhate and online misogyny more broadly also have material consequences. Therefore, these discursive phenomena “cannot be reduced to isolated antagonisms” that occur in online spaces but should instead be understood as “the product of systemic misogyny and sexism in the wider culture, combined with

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the technological affordances of various platforms and their attendant (sub)cultures” that are both reflective of and an extension to “polarize[d] contemporary gender politics” (Ging and Siapera 2018: 522). Twitter is of particular interest here due to its large (192 million daily active users) and overwhelmingly male (70 per cent) global user base (Newberry 2021; “Q4 and Fiscal Year 2020 Letter to Shareholders” 2021: 4). As Khosravinik and Esposito (2018: 54) note, “there is discursive power where there is communication concentration”. The discursive power of Twitter, combined with its majority male userbase and a broader popular misogyny (see, for example, Banet-Weiser 2018), creates a mediated environment that is ripe for networked misogyny to proliferate. Additionally, social media have been noted as force multipliers for cyberhate due to their perceived anonymity and tendency towards de-individuation – i.e., mob mentality – amongst other things (KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018). In this landscape, collective identities are discursively “constituted/ marked/ represented” along gendered “boundaries of difference, uniqueness, and distinctiveness” (KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018). This is, of course, not only true of gendered boundaries but equally – and perhaps more so – for other marginalised and/or oppressed group identities. Writing as a long-time Whovian and cisgender white feminist scholar based in the United States, I necessarily enter this research as an aca-fan with an explicit rejection of Western patriarchal norms. I am also mindful that I am, in some ways, complicit in their making. The goal of this chapter is not to cover the full population of #NotMyDoctor discourses across platforms or even every Tweet posted between the date of the initial announcement and the date of this writing. Instead, my aim is to highlight some representative examples during a one-day snapshot of Twitter for the purpose of identifying, analysing, and contextualizing the discourses surrounding this phenomenon. There are many approaches to studying discourse on social media, such as social semiotics (van Leeuwen 2005; Zhao and Zappavigna 2018; Poulsen, Kvåle, and van Leeuwen 2018) and Critical Technical Discourse Analysis or CTDA (Brock 2018; Brock 2016). Both social semiotics and CTDA are forms of critical discourse analysis, where the former interrogates meaning-making practices through “semiotic interactions” (van Leeuwen 2005) and the latter is a critical cultural approach that “provides a holistic analysis of the interactions between technology, cultural ideology, and technology practice” (Brock 2016: 2). In contrast, this chapter is guided by a feminist media and fan studies perspective and employs a subset of critical discourse analysis (CDA) – social media critical discourse studies (SM-CDS) – to explore online audience reactions to the Thirteenth Doctor. CDA is one of the most common types of textual analysis used in qualitative methods because it provides insights into how discourse impacts on “culture, pol-

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itics, and ideology”, while “accounting for processes of production, consumption, and distribution” of those discourses (KhosraviNik 2020: 1). In this way, CDA sees discourse as a power- and ideologically-laden social practice that emerges by and through interaction (Fairclough and Wodak 1997). CDA attends to contradictions and inconsistencies, demystifies discursive practices and enhances human communication transparently and within the appropriate context (Reisigl and Wodak 2017). SM-CDS recognizes there may, at times, be a need to reconsider some of the traditional assumptions of CDA, as well as the importance of thinking critically about the nature of digitally mediated discursive construction rather than “simply doing CDS [CDA] on the materials (which happen to be) on the Internet” (KhosraviNik 2020: 3). As such, it explicitly extends this work into the digital realm as an “always-on” paradigm that operates “at the intersection of mass and interpersonal communication” (Khosravinik and Esposito 2018: 46). Effective SM-CDS is interdisciplinary and draws on an empirical text-based approach, taking into account both horizontal (e.g., technological affordances and associated consequences) and vertical (e.g., the broad cultural context) discursive practices (KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018). Drawing from CDA and also Critical Social Media Studies, SM-CDS examines algorithmic power, the deployment and patterns of meaning-making materials, the discursive construction of constraints and opportunities (and their consequences at both the local and macro levels), and the production, consumption, and circulation of “digitally facilitated spaces, platforms, and practices” where they “live” (KhosraviNik 2020: 3). Specifically related to mediated misogyny, there are several considerations when undertaking SM-CDS: social and technological macro-contexts and larger gender-related issues with regard to the same; platform affordances; a description of the discursive event; a textual analysis that includes meaning-making practices specific to the platform (e.g., likes, retweets etc.); and, conclusions that “consider findings from micro aspects of the analysis spiralling out to immediate and wider context levels” (KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018) or what KhosraviNik (2020: 3) has termed the Techno-Discursive dynamic. Importantly, SM-CDS remains attentive to the critical nature of classic CDA. In other words, SM-CDS is, perhaps, most interested in research topics, including “racism, collective identity, conflict, gender, nationalism, populism, and immigration” (KhosraviNik 2020).

The case: #NotMyDoctor on Twitter What follows is a grounded, inductive, and intertextual critical analysis of Twitter discourse using the hashtag #NotMyDoctor on the date of the Thirteenth Doctor

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announcement, 16 July 2017. The hashtag trended on this day. Twitter was selected because it is widely used as a source of real-time conversations on timely topics by a range of people – from the ordinary citizen to elite gatekeepers like journalists and politicians (Puschmann et al. 2014). The search was conducted in April 2018 using Twitter’s Advanced Search functionality, which returned 826 Tweets. These Tweets were manually collected and stored in a spreadsheet with the gender of the poster and the content of the Tweet, including any attachments such as memes.2 It is possible some of the original Tweets could have been deleted between the date of the announcement in July 2017 and when the data were collected in April 2018. In total, 143 Tweets were removed from the sample. These included 27 in languages other than English,3 108 using only the hashtag with no additional text or images, four with no reference to Doctor Who at all and four using the trending hashtag to promote unrelated products. This resulted in a final sample size of 683, which included roughly half the posts in the #NotMyDoctor camp with the other half being split between the pro-female Doctor faction and those who were either neutral on the matter or trolling anti-female Doctor users. A limitation of this study for SM-CDS is that the author did not originally collect the numbers of Likes and ReTweets, which became difficult to collect in hindsight during editing. Because Tweets were manually collected, and in keeping with grounded inductive analysis, initial thematic codes were developed based on the initial reading during collection. These ten thematic codes included: sexism/ misogyny, racism, ableism, classism, political correctness gone awry, trolling the haters, comparisons to other doctors in popular culture, comparisons to other programmes with female leads, Whovian lore (pro), and Whovian lore (con). The use of the #NotMyDoctor hashtag did not begin, and will probably not end, with the announcement of the Thirteenth Doctor. Doctor Who fandom has 2. While an imperfect measure, user gender was determined by user names and photos. If there was any question (e.g. the avatar was a cartoon etc.), the gender was coded as indeterminate. There were 178 Tweets by users who presented as women, 496 by those who presented as men and 152 that were indeterminate in the final sample. User names and location data were not stored for privacy reasons. Sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, class and ability are difficult, if not impossible, to determine based on a user name and photo in many cases – particularly in a snapshot sample such as this. As such, the determination was made not to code for these identity markers. However, anecdotally, the users did seem to be overwhelmingly heterosexual and white. 3. Heft et al. (2020) have noted an “English-language bias” on social media with Englishlanguage Facebook and Twitter pages garnering the highest demand even when the same content is presented in other languages. It is not uncommon for English speaking scholars to remove non-English posts from their data sets (see, for example, Blodgett 2020; Byerly 2020). Removing these Tweets does not preclude possible future work exploring foreign language responses to the Thirteenth Doctor.

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long lamented the loss of its Doctors as they regenerate into new incarnations traversing space and time in a battered blue police box to save the multiverse. There is even a popular meme about the regenerative cycle as stages of grief. But the hashtag has never before seen such a surge in popularity, which ultimately resulted in its briefly trending on 16 July 2017 and in at least one spinoff hashtag, #NurseWho. On the day of the announcement, #NotMyDoctor first appeared with a Tweet by an indeterminate user that succinctly sums up the general sentiment of many in the anti-female Doctor camp (all Tweets below are recorded exactly as the user published them): “Unbelievable, they got an inanimate object to play the doctor, so PC. #NotMyDoctor.” Perhaps this user foresaw the making of the first ever Doctor Who Barbie (an injection-moulded objectification of the first ever female Doctor that sold out and was backordered within hours), but this comment more likely reflects a media and societal tendency to reduce women to objects, which is particularly relevant in social media spaces where far-right groups deploy what Massanari (2018) terms the “alt-right gaze” to surveil and harass targeted individuals – disproportionately women and those from marginalised groups. The day ended with a male user’s Tweet pondering the uproar over the new female Doctor: “In the spirit of goodwill and education, I’d like to hear why people are upset about #JodieWhittaker being #thedoctor and the core of the #NotMyDoctor argument. I am for her being The Doctor, so let me know your perspective politely because I don’t understand and want to. Thanks.” In-between these two Tweets ran nearly a thousand more that were alternatively disapproving or supportive of the casting decision with others trolling the #NotMyDoctor crowd. The trolls can be further delineated between those satirically posting images of other popular culture doctors (e.g., Dr. Strange, Dr. No, Dr. Seuss, etc.), those calling #NotMyDoctor Tweeters insulting names (e.g., manbabies, virgins etc.) and those using Whovian intratextual expertise to take Whittaker’s detractors to task.

Trolling the broflakes It did not take long for a man seemingly peering into a crystal ball to foretell the Twitterspheric events of 16 July. In fact, his Nostradamus-like post was only the second of the day: “I bet that the #NotMyDoctor hashtag is already on the finger tips of all the crybabies, ready to be angryjaculated from their fingers.” He could not have been more correct. These types of trolling insults, equating #NotMyDoctor advocates with whining crybabies, continued through the day with some addressing the literal writing on the proverbial Twitter wall. Posted with a meme of Doctor Who characters that reads, “Children are instinctively

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cruel beings”, a man Tweeted, “What a bunch of butt hurt misogynistic babies we getting in the #NotMyDoctor tag.” Other posts referred to #NotMyDoctor Tweets using the hashtag to call out those who disliked the addition of a female doctor as “broflakes”, “snowflakes”, “man-babies”, and “man-children”, while repeatedly referencing male fragility, fragile masculinity, and an inability to find a mate as the root cause of the anger at a female Doctor. In addition to name-calling and insults, there are also numerous gifs and photos of crying babies, children throwing temper tantrums and David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor standing in the rain and crying. As with much online discourse, Tweets posted in relation to this digital fandom made widespread use of trolling those with differing opinions – this was the single largest category of the ten themes. Not all users trolled naysayers with insults or satirical comparisons. Intratextual expertise around the programmatic canon and history was also employed in several dozen cases to illustrate how the choice of a female Doctor fits with Whovian mythology and values. Several online fans recognized that the Doctor has long been a pacifist who stands up for equality, promotes peace and regularly engages in critical thinking (rather than resorting to violence) to defeat evildoers across the multiverse. For example, one woman Tweeted: “To all those saying #NotMyDoctor: DW has always given us positive teachings, i.e., to not discriminate. Maybe you missed those moments?” This sentiment vaguely alludes to the programme’s more teachable moments, which these fans seem to decode as designed to inspire a general sense of humanity in its viewers. Another indeterminate user was more specific about the kinds of lessons Doctor Who has always tried to teach its fans: “13 Doctors taught us tolerance, personal power, showed strong women. And then #notmydoctor happens? Have you been sleeping all the time?” These Tweeted discourses use narratives of fandom to debunk the negative #NotMyDoctor posts. Still others use Doctor Who mythology and history to “prove” The Doctor being a woman makes sense in the Whoniverse. The Thirteenth Doctor’s regeneration as a woman isn’t without precedent in the Doctor Who narrative universe, which fans were quick to point out in the online debate around the #NotMyDoctor hashtag. One man referenced the Master’s regeneration in season 10 of New Who under showrunner Steven Moffat: “Everyone in the #NotMyDoctor camp ATM!! I think Jodie is a brilliant choice for #DrWho13 let’s not forget the masters recent regeneration.” Prior to actress Michelle Gomez portraying the Master as Missy, the character had not been seen on the programme since John Simm played the role in 2010 (season 5). Another male Whovian went even deeper into the series canon by citing a character never seen on screen but most recently described by the Eleventh Doctor, played by actor Matt Smith, as having regenerated as both a Time Lord and a Time Lady on at least two occasions: “#doctorwho honestly guys if the master and the cor-

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sair can do it so can the main man (or woman), #NotMyDoctor is bullshit.” Although there is some debate amongst Whovians around whether fans have actually seen the Corsair on the programme through the years, the Eleventh Doctor described his friend in the episode The Doctor’s Wife as simultaneously “one of the good ones” and “a very bad girl” (“‘Doctor Who’ The Doctor’s Wife (TV Episode 2011) – Matt Smith as The Doctor – IMDb” n.d.) In other words, the Corsair as a man was the Doctor’s friend, while the Corsair as a woman was his foil. Canonical knowledge was also deployed in several instances not only to justify the casting of a female Doctor but also to draw distinctions between good and bad fans. One user of indeterminate gender is a case in point: “Being a bad fan isn’t way to support a show.. Seeing that it’s first producer was female. #NotMyDoctor #DoctorWho13 #DoctorWho @shortmemory.” This Tweet not only applies historical canon trivia to its analysis but also begins to establish a hierarchy amongst fans. In this case, the simple dualism between good Whovians and bad. Other users also tacitly identify good versus bad fans, while also connecting this continuum to a broader cultural context about what makes humanity at large worth saving. These posts, which are mostly by men, draw on the Doctor’s positive attributes discussed above to argue that anyone who would oppose a female Doctor isn’t worth saving: “If you write #NotMyDoctor, you’re not the kind of person The Doctor wants to save. So everyone wins.”

Social justice warriors, Feminazis & the (Anti)-PC police A second common theme in the data set can broadly be characterised as backlash politics against social justice warriors, in particular feminists, and the so-called PC police. These posts echo widespread contemporary discourses about political correctness run amok in the hands of cultural Marxists attempting to dissolve perceived civil liberties, including amongst other things the right to “free speech”, which is understood amongst this crowd as the right to say anything one desires free of consequences. This type of rhetoric is also rampant within conservative populist politics and almost always undergirded not only by misogyny and patriarchy, but also by racism, classism, and heteronormativity. The presence of Tweets citing political correctness run wild and referencing politics generally suggests a large segment of the #NotMyDoctor Tweeters likely hold traditional views that are challenged by changes to the status quo and dominant heteronormative white middle class masculinity – even in the fictional Whoniverse. A Tweet from a user of indeterminate gender sums this up in a nutshell. Posted alongside a decapitated female body wearing a Make America Great Again one-piece bathing suit, the Tweet reads, “What a great swimsuit #NotMyDoctor #TDF2017

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#GameOf Thrones #Federer #Wimbledon2017 #AmericaFirst #Trump45 #MAGA.” This hodgepodge of hashtags representing two science fiction/ fantasy series, two athletic competitions, and a whole lot of U.S. nationalism illustrates the ways in which cult television fandom doesn’t exist in isolation but is informed by current events. Tweets within this theme both implicitly and explicitly rail against political correctness and social justice. Implied nods to the anti-PC police theme often revolve around a perceived disruption of tradition and/or traditional values that can be read through casting choices in Doctor Who. For example, a woman’s post reads: “#NotMyDoctor the doctor has ALWAYS been a man, why change?” Other Tweets made comparisons between the Doctor and different fictional characters from popular culture. Many of these insinuate either directly or indirectly that casting off a character’s (fictional) type is a result of political correctness and will sound the death knell for the franchise. A case in point is this man’s post about a beloved action hero, which has seen its own uproar over rumours the franchise may cast a Black actor as its next .007: “whats next james bond to be female? #drwho #notmydoctor #docotor13.” Another man’s Tweet, which appears to be referencing the poor box office sales of the latest iteration of Ghostbusters, also illustrates the sentiment that popular culture has become too politically correct while ignoring factors other than gender that may have contributed to a generally poor box office performance, including an overblown budget and general cultural malaise around most reboots and sequels: “Ask the studio that made the all female Ghostbusters if this is a good idea. #DoctorWho13 #NotMyDoctor #RhetoricalQuestion.” It seems, for the #NotMyDoctor fans, even Old Saint Nick isn’t safe from the anti-PC police, as evidenced by this man’s Tweet: “Sigh… Very disappointing. What’s next, gender swapping Santa clause? I Wouldn’t make Wonder Woman a man. #notmydoctor.” Other PC-related Tweets in the data set were far more explicit in their denouncing of political correctness. Both men and women were unambiguous in their related posts and largely mirrored the larger cultural rhetoric hostile toward so-called social justice warriors supposedly ruining tradition. For example, this repeated male poster’s Tweet: “Shame on you! Murdered a part of our culture for femnazi political correctness ideology! Hope you get fired after one episode.. #NotMyDoctor.” Rush Limbaugh popularised the term feminazi as a pejorative for feminists, and the term has lived on as a common way to demonise and silence women in online spaces (Hesse 2021). Despite the misogynistic overtones throughout the anti-PC police theme, a few women went so far as to leverage their self-identification as female as a ‘get out of jail free card’ for their anger toward the new Doctor. For example, this woman Tweets directly at showrunners, weaponizing her femaleness to decry political correctness and inform them they have lost

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her as a fan: “@bbcdoctorwho Well I guess I won’t watch the show anymore. As a woman is #NotMyDoctor It was done just to be PC. I will miss the Doctors.” Some female-identifying fans also seem to miss the inherent misogyny entirely and use the very public online forum to make sure others know they are not “sexist” but still think “this female doctor is a bad idea!” For the anti-PC police Whovians, the new female Doctor is just one more example of feminist, “libtards”, and snowflakes forcing social upheaval by seeking more equitable representation and social power relations.

A penis-operated TARDIS There is a generally derogatory perspective of women in the #NotMyDoctor data set with many posts pointing out all the things that make women less capable or credible as The Doctor. Many of these more than 150 sexist and/or misogynist posts also allude to what it means to be a “true woman” (i.e., she is not a multiverse-saving alien with two hearts and a blue police box). Some posts critique the work of writers and producers who “failed” at their job to entertain fans, while operating under the assumption that wearing female undergarments somehow precludes a person from saving the world in this fictional universe: “You had one jop one goddamn jop .. thanks for ruining the Doctor, funny the Doctor wardrobe gonna have a BRA section now. #NotMyDoctor.” Other posts situate female fans as throwaways: “The show is just pandering to the lowest percentage of fans #NotMyDoctor” and females, in general, as unable to use tools (again to save the world), presumably because they are more interested in commodity culture or being pretty by wearing makeup: “How can the doctor use a sonic screwdriver now, she’s a lady #doctorwho13 #nursewho #notmydoctor #soniclipstick.” Women also are cast as incapable of basic self-sufficiency. As but one example, a man notes they are unable to operate motor vehicles: “Women can’t drive cars never mind a Tardis #NotMyDoctor.” Interestingly, one man apparently noted the offensive assumption that women cannot drive, firing back at the sentiment: “#DoctorWho So, apparently, people think that the TARDIS is penis operated. #NotMyDoctor.” However, this man was in the minority, and a Tweet just a short time later was accompanied by a handy image of an Ikea kitchen with the phrase “New TARDIS interior revealed” on it and unsurprisingly resorting to the age-old adage that a woman’s place is in the kitchen (rather than time travelling through space saving the world): “So will the #TARDIS turn into a kitchen on the inside? #NotMyDoctor.” In most cases, this backlash relates to gender but also to a lesser degree to race and sexuality (e.g., hypothesizing the next Doctors will be Black

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men and women and that the casting of Whittaker is about “ugly transgender politics”). There is very little discussion of class or ability. In summary, these negatively coded responses seem to subscribe to what could best be described as the Cult of True Womanhood (Welter 1966). Users who espouse views in line with true womanhood see women as inherently (i.e., biologically) connected with reproductive and affective labour that precludes them not only from the public sphere but also from an ability to be believed as a hero under Western ideals of neoliberal capitalism. This group of users, and to some degree also the anti-PC police group, is informed by a series of interconnected current events driven by misogyny, including the wave of conservative populism and the international rise of the #MeToo movement and the first international Women’s March.

Discussion & conclusion The representative snapshot of #NotMyDoctor Twitter discourse contained within the data set largely reflects a patriarchal status quo and gendered social norms based on the biological two-sex system. This finding lends support to the argument that social media spaces of discursive practice are far from democratizing forces for good in the world but, in fact, reflect and amplify social hierarchies that already exist in the material world. The prevalence of Tweets deploying problematically gendered (and sometimes racialised and sexualised) language and master tropes is reflective of women’s, and other marginalised identities’ to varying degrees, inequitable status in the world, as well as the continuing male centric nature of science fiction fandom. This online space is simply an extension of these real-world norms that grants many of these users the psychological space to be far more vocal and hostile than they might otherwise be in an interpersonal environment due to force multiplication (KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018). Users repeatedly allude to the perceived “fact” that a female Doctor is unrealistic and often base these comments on common tropes that situate women as irrational, incapable, and certainly belonging in the private sphere. The gendered language and visual texts in the data set employ heteronormative ideologies in an attempt to make their case. Some of these hegemonic notions include the ideas that women should be in kitchen, women can’t drive and are incompetent to perform even the most mundane everyday handywork, women are unable to be anything other than the object of a man’s sexual desire, women cannot be heroes for male fans and women (most especially feminists) ruin all of men’s supposed good, clean fun. In other words, in the fictional Whoniverse, women can be companions of the Doctor but not the Doctor himself, despite the

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fact that the character has largely been portrayed as an asexual alien being. To portray him as female is viewed by these users as a betrayal of its fandom by the show’s creators and the BBC at large, but there are also larger foes at work – cultural Marxists, especially feminists, who threaten “tradition” via calls for equitable and inclusive representation (i.e., “politically correct” representation) in their favourite programme. There are more than double the number of male users (as opposed to female) posting with the #NotMyDoctor hashtag in this data set, and there are significantly more men Tweeting posts with a negative sentiment toward the new female Doctor. This suggests that men and women do, in fact, read texts differently regarding cult television fandom – in this case, around issues of gender representation in their favourite sci-fi programme. However, the data do not necessarily suggest that women rely primarily on affect and personal experiences while men organize around authorship and credibility, as Jenkins proposed. Certainly, there is evidence of these behaviours; however, most male #NotMyDoctor Tweeters seem to be far more personally affected about the new Doctor than do female users. This may have to do with the general prevalence of emotionally charged discourse and cyberhate online in connection with force multiplication of existing sexist and misogynistic opinions, attitudes, and beliefs supported by patriarchy and male supremacism. At the same time, a significant number of users push back against these problematically normative assumptions, which suggests the discursive nature of Twitter can, in some circumstances, offer a space where marginalised voices can be heard. Fans draw on intratextual expertise more frequently when arguing for the new female Doctor than against her. Time and again, the Whoniverse canon and heritage is called upon to illustrate that there is narrative space for the reality of a Time Lady (why she cannot simply still be The Doctor, of course, is also deeply gendered). More often, though, fans of the new female Doctor troll the “broflakes”. In other words, the communal nature of networked participatory culture in the digital cult fandom surrounding Doctor Who appears to be in serious flux in the discursive concentration of power around the #NotMyDoctor hashtag. Angry fans lament the new female Thirteenth Doctor, while other fans either troll them with sarcasm and memes, make fun of them with insults and name-calling, or school them with canon lore. This does seem to split, with some outliers, along gender lines (and, we must also consider that it is impossible to know for sure whether all of the posters using the hashtag are, in fact, actual fans). There are a few women in the data set who are not in favour of the new female Thirteenth Doctor; similarly, there are men who are. What could be considered positive communal discourse, however, is lacking throughout. Instead, most users whether pro- or anti- the first female Doctor use insults, name-calling and trolling to assert their opinions in the

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fan community. This lends support to the force multiplication of gendered online hostility and cyberhate but does raise concerns about the possible types of belonging fans on Twitter choose to perform. Moreover, the sheer proportion of male versus female users in the data set indicates a participation gap not only on Twitter at large but also for women in science fiction fandom. As Whovians eagerly awaited the delivery of their backordered Thirteenth Doctor Who Barbie dolls (complete with come hither doe eyes, overtly contoured cheekbones, a giraffe-like neck and a “hip/ waist/ bust ratio is more unbelievable than a 2,000-year-old alien with two hearts”) in late 2018, the new Doctor continued travelling through space and time in her TARDIS (BBC News 2018). As expected, Whittaker brought with her a new cast of companions, including a disabled Black male teenager named Ryan (played by Tosin Cole), his female English-Indian police officer friend Yas (played by Mandip Gill) and his white step-grandfather Graham (played by Bradley Walsh). Doctor Who has never been so diverse, and initial indicators show that the more equitable and inclusive representations have not sent the consummate sci-fi series spiralling into the far reaches of the ratings universe. In fact, the season launch drew the highest ever episode audience since the programme returned with New Who (BBC News 2018). Perhaps, audiences were simply curious or, one hopes, the gendered cyberhate on Twitter actually represents a small but vocal minority, while the larger fanbase is ready for the kind of change Doctor Who has always potentially represented – if not always quite lived up to in practice.

Epilogue A lot has transpired since writing this chapter in early 2018 in the wake of the #MeToo movement and the first international Women’s March. Black Lives Matter erupted to push back against ongoing and largely unchecked police brutality of Black and Brown bodies. Social media giants have de-platformed accounts espousing hate speech with varying rates of effectiveness – even Trump was permanently banned from Twitter. The coronavirus pandemic has increased hate crimes against Asians and Asian-Americans, disproportionately impacting on women. Insurrectionists attempted to overtake the Capitol and prevent Joe Biden’s confirmation as U.S. president on 6 January 2021. Buried amongst these more important headlines, the #NotMyDoctor crowd remains, in many cases appropriated by groups decrying both First Lady Jill Biden’s use of the term “doctor” as a Doctor of Philosophy and Covid vaccinations related to Dr Anthony Fauci. Still, as recently as September 2021 at the time of writing this, the

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#NotMyDoctor hashtag is also still being used to protest against Whittaker as the Thirteenth Doctor (McAndrew 2020).

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Hills, Matt, and Joanne Garde-Hansen. 2017. “Fandom’s Paratextual Memory: Remembering, Reconstructing, and Repatriating ‘Lost’ Doctor Who.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 34 (2): 158–167. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2017.1293276 IMDB. 2011. “‘Doctor Who’ The Doctor’s Wife (TV Episode 2011) – Matt Smith as The Doctor – IMDB.” n.d. Accessed 20 March 2021. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1721226 /characters/nm1741002 Jane, Emma A. 2017. Misogyny Online: A Short (and Brutish) History. Sage Swifts. Thousand Oaks: SAGE. https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/misogyny-online/book245572. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473916029

Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. Studies in Culture and Communication. Routledge. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct =true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=cat06552a&AN=gsu.997174223402952&site=eds-live &scope=site&custid=gsu1 Jenkins, Henry. 2006. “Convergence Culture.” NYU Press (blog). 2006. https://nyupress.org /9780814742952/convergence-culture Jenkins, H., M. Ito, and d. boyd. 2015. “Participatory Culture in a Networked Era: A Conversation on Youth, Learning, Commerce, and Politics | Wiley.” Wiley.Com. 2015. https://www.wiley.com/en-us /Participatory+Culture+in+a+Networked+Era%3A+A+Conversation+on+Youth%2C+Le arning%2C+Commerce%2C+and+Politics-p-9780745660707 Jowett, Lorna. 2014. “The Girl Who Waited? Female Companions and Gender in Doctor Who.” Critical Studies in Television: Scholarly Studies in Small Screen Fictions 9 (1): 77–94. https://doi.org/10.7227/CST.9.1.6 Keller, Jessalynn, Kaitlynn Mendes, and Jessica Ringrose. 2018. “Speaking ‘Unspeakable Things’: Documenting Digital Feminist Responses to Rape Culture.” Journal of Gender Studies 27 (1): 22–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2016.1211511 KhosraviNik, Majid. 2020. “Digital Meaning-Making across Content and Practice in Social Media Critical Discourse Studies.” Critical Discourse Studies, Online First: 119–123. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2020.1835683

KhosraviNik, Majid, and Eleonora Esposito. 2018. “Online Hate, Digital Discourse and Critique: Exploring Digitally-Mediated Discursive Practices of Gender-Based Hostility.” Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 14 (June): 45–68. https://doi.org/10.1515/lpp-2018-0003 Marwick, Alice E. 2013. “Gender, Sexuality and Social Media.” In Routledge Handbook of Social Media, edited by T. Senft and J. Hunsinger. New York: Routledge. https://www .semanticscholar.org/paper/%22-Gender%2C-Sexuality-and-Social-Media%22-from-theof-Marwick/5c002eba1eb2d09390f8a6429c68c797e9ecabf1 Marwick, Alice E. 2019. “None of This Is New (Media): Feminisms in the Social Media Age.” In The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Feminism. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315728346-21

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McAndrew, O. 2020. “Here’s Why The ‘Not My Doctor’ Campaign Has To End.” Small Screen (blog). 28 September 2020. https://www.small-screen.co.uk/doctor-who-not-my-doctorjodie-whittaker-bbc/ McNamee, G. L. n.d. “The Simpsons | Creators, Characters, Synopsis, & Facts.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Accessed March 9, 2021. https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Simpsons Meehan, E. R. 2006. “Gendering the Commodity Audience: Critical Media Research, Feminism, and Political Economy.” 2006. /paper/Gendering-the-Commodity-Audience%3A-Critical-Media-%2C-Meehan/e3f9c16c9d6330bbd38928b81eb7615ba25ab2c2 Newberry, C. 2021. “36 Twitter Statistics All Marketers Should Know in 2021.” Hootsuite. 3 February 2021. https://blog.hootsuite.com/twitter-statistics/ Orthia, Lindy A., and Rachel Morgain. 2016. “The Gendered Culture of Scientific Competence: A Study of Scientist Characters in Doctor Who 1963–2013.” Sex Roles: A Journal of Research 75 (3–4): 79–94. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-016-0597-y Pearson, R. 2010. “Fandom in the Digital Era: Georgia State University Library.” 2010. https:// eds.b.ebscohost.com/eds/detail/detail?vid=69&sid=650d756d-473b-469f-b64e2db237807aff%40pdc-v-sessmgr01&bdata =JkF1dGhUeXBlPWlwLHNoaWImc2l0ZT1lZHMtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN =47906533&db=a9h Penley, Constance. 1994. “Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture.” Visual Culture: Images & Interpretations January: 302–324. Pinault, S. 2012. “Why Doctor Who Can Cross Time and Space But Can Never Be a Woman | WIRED.” 2012. https://www.wired.com/2012/07/doctor-who-woman/ Placido, Dani Di. 2017. “BBC Responds Respectfully To Disgruntled ‘Doctor Who’ Fans.” Forbes. 2017. https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2017/07/20/bbc-respondsrespectfully-to-disgruntled-doctor-who-fans/ Plunkett, J. 2016. “We Nearly Appointed a Black Doctor, Says Doctor Who Showrunner.” The Guardian. 2 June 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/jun/02/stevenmoffat-there-was-going-to-be-a-black-doctor-who Poulsen, Søren Vigild, Gunhild Kvåle, and Theo van Leeuwen. 2018. “Special Issue: Social Media as Semiotic Technology.” Social Semiotics 28 (5): 593–600. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2018.1509815

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Index # #Metoo 167, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 201, 203 #SenDeAnlat 167, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185 A Affect 6, 9, 10, 15, 23, 24, 25, 26, 31, 32, 38, 39, 44, 45, 46, 47, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 67, 71, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 191, 201, 202 Affective communication 61, 62, 77 Affordance 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 11, 15, 17, 25, 26, 28, 29, 31, 64, 76, 78, 87, 118, 122, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 135, 137, 140, 141, 148, 150, 157, 167, 193, 194 Algorithm 6, 7, 8, 10, 18, 24, 25, 30, 31, 55, 60, 61, 62, 64, 67, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 114, 162, 169, 170, 171, 194 (Algorithmic) Synchronization 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79 (Algorithmic) regimentation 7, 18, 55 Ambient affiliation 6, 171 Antagonism 11, 107, 108, 109, 112, 113, 115, 116, 117, 120, 121, 148, 192 Arab 60, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 116, 155 Argumentation 24, 32, 61, 74, 84, 85, 86, 90, 91, 96, 97, 98, 149, 154, 157, 162 Argumentation strategies 84, 88 Authenticity 11, 31, 108, 111, 113, 115, 116, 118, 121

B Bottom up (discursive practice) 1, 2, 6, 10, 11, 12, 29, 64, 84, 91, 93, 97, 102, 103, 128, 130, 146, 147, 151, 153, 162, 163 Top down (discursive practice) 1, 2, 5, 6, 10, 62, 64, 83, 84, 91, 93, 103, 147, 151, 163 C Critical Discourse Analysis (including CDA) 5, 10, 18, 38, 39, 43, 44, 45, 47, 54, 56, 112, 115, 117, 118, 119, 122, 127, 131, 141, 181, 183, 187, 193, 194 Critical Discourse Studies (including CDS) 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 38, 39, 43, 44, 45, 56, 84, 87, 88, 89, 92, 102, 103, 128, 141, 149, 150, 163, 167, 169, 171, 172, 181, 190, 194 China (including Chinese) 8, 9, 15, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 54, 55, 56, 66, 113 CMDA (Computer Mediated Discourse Analysis) 5, 29, 150 Computer Mediated Communication (including CMC) 5, 6, 23, 130, 150, 159 Conspiracy 11, 107, 109, 115, 120, 121 Counterspeech 11, 12, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163 Cyberactivism 172, 173 D Digital activism 29, 97, 169, 182 Digital discourse 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 21, 32, 83, 87, 127, 128, 130, 146, 148, 151, 155, 161, 167, 168, 181, 189 Digital distribution 9, 15

Digital ethnography 4, 9, 10, 15, 26, 27, 28, 32, 83, 87, 151 (digital) Fandoms 12, 187, 189, 190, 191, 192, 195, 197, 199, 201, 202, 203 Digital practice 4, 5, 8, 9, 17, 29, 38, 92, 149, 151, 155, 163 Discourse Theory 8, 112, 113, 115, 116, 120, 121 Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) 24, 28, 55, 84, 89, 90, 91, 94, 102, 149, 158 Discursive power 10, 16, 23, 31, 38, 56, 60, 64, 78, 169, 170, 173, 193 Discursive practice 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 16, 17, 19, 28, 30, 38, 39, 40, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 90, 114, 127, 129, 147, 148, 155, 167, 168, 169, 178, 181, 194, 201 Disinformation 11, 107, 108, 109. 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 148, 168 Doctor Who 12, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 195, 196, 197, 198. 199, 202, 203 Double contextualisation 19, 28, 32 Horizontal (contextualisation) 3, 4, 19, 20, 28, 46, 62, 78, 88, 150, 194 Vertical (contextualisation) 3, 19, 28, 46, 62, 78, 150, 194 E Ethnic 10, 26, 38, 83, 84, 85, 90, 93, 95, 99, 100, 102, 103, 133, 134, 136, 141, 146, 155, 188, 191, 195 F Fake news 11, 23, 107, 110, 112, 121, 122, 148

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Fan studies 187, 193 Far right 11, 107, 109, 115, 116, 119, 120, 196 Feminism (including feminist) 8, 9, 12, 119, 149, 167, 171, 172, 173, 175, 181, 183, 187, 189, 191, 193, 198, 199, 200, 201 G Gender 12, 26, 38, 65, 75, 122, 151, 153, 155, 160, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203 Greece 9, 10, 83, 84, 86, 87, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 103 H Hashtag 6, 12, 17, 30, 74, 118, 167, 168, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 187, 189, 191, 192, 194, 195, 196, 197, 199, 202, 204 Henan 9, 10, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56 Hybridity 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 75, 77 I Identity 8, 10, 40, 46, 49, 53, 55, 60, 61, 64, 66, 67, 71, 75, 79, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 92, 95, 96, 101, 102, 103, 109, 111, 112, 113, 117, 119, 129, 130, 132, 134, 138, 139, 151, 155, 160, 168, 173, 192, 194, 195 Indexicality 10, 29, 60, 65, 76, 77, 78 intertextual 30, 90, 114, 118, 119, 170, 194 Islam 10, 30, 60, 61, 63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 116, 156, 160, 178 Muslim 10, 11, 26, 56, 60, 61, 63, 66, 68, 70, 107, 109, 115, 116, 117, 120, 154, 156, 158, 160

K Kuwait 10, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 70, 76, 77, 78 M Macedonia 10, 83, 84, 87, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103 Meaning making 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 25, 28, 31, 38, 43, 46, 112, 113, 115, 127, 147, 149, 151, 155, 163, 168, 171, 181, 190, 193, 194, 200, 201 Misogyny 20, 111, 148, 171, 173, 182, 189, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 198 Middle East 60, 61, 65, 76 Multimodal 3, 5, 6, 10, 16, 17, 18, 29, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 72, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 114, 118, 119, 151 N Nationalism 10, 83, 84, 85, 87, 96, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 154, 194, 199 New Zealand 8, 9, 11, 12, 146, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154, 157, 159, 160, 161, 163 O Observation (method) 4, 28, 29, 30, 32, 92, 128, 141, 147, 148, 149, 151, 163 P Participatory 2, 3, 8, 11, 24, 26, 38, 42, 44, 76, 79, 84, 111, 114, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 134, 140, 141, 147, 150, 157, 163, 167, 170, 171, 181, 202 Poland (Polish) 9, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141 Political polemic 10, 83 Populism 18, 194, 201 Prespa Agreement 84, 87, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102 Public sphere 10, 19, 24, 30, 42, 83, 84, 88, 90, 91, 102, 103, 151, 162, 172, 174, 179, 180, 181, 182, 201

R Racism 6, 11, 20, 56, 111, 117, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 161, 162, 171, 189, 194, 195, 198 Discrimination 10, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 47, 54, 55, 56, 128, 161, 171 S Sentiment Analysis 9, 15, 23, 24, 25, 31, 32 Sexism 12, 56, 167, 192, 195 Social Media Communication 2, 18, 21, 23, 24, 29, 62, 113, 114, 129, 147, 150, 167 Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (including SM-CDS) 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 12, 15, 17, 19, 20, 28, 29, 30, 32, 56, 88, 90, 113, 122, 129, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 161, 163, 167, 169, 170, 171, 173, 183, 193, 194, 195 Social Network Analysis 5, 9, 15, 21, 31 Syria 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78 T Techno discursive 7, 12, 32, 39, 60, 62, 78, 87, 93, 102, 114, 117, 121, 122, 146, 147, 148, 194 Topos 91, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103 Turkey 8, 9, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 182, 183 Twitter 2, 6, 7, 12, 22, 26, 30, 42, 107, 109, 111, 117, 118, 119, 122, 147, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175, 178, 180, 183, 187, 189, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 201, 202, 203 Typology 11, 127, 128, 131, 132, 140, 141 Y YouTube 10, 12, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 146, 147, 151, 152, 153, 154, 157, 161, 162, 163

Social Media and Society brings together a range of scholars working at the intersection of discourse studies, digital media, and society. It is meant to respond to changes in discourse technologies, i.e. the techno-discursive dynamic of social media discourses. The book critically engages with the digital dynamics of representations around discourses of identity, politics, and culture. Other than its topical focus on highly pertinent discourses, the book aspires to offer some fresh insights into the theory, methods, and implementation of CDS in digital environments. The book can be viewed as part of the developing research framework of Social Media Critical Discourse Studies which seeks to integrate the impact of new mediation technologies on discursive meaning-making with its critical contextualisation. In addition to its strongly global outlook, the book incorporates a wide range of research perspectives including CDA, sociolinguistics, political discourse studies, media and technology, discourse theory, popular culture, feminism etc.

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