China Virus, Kung Flu, and MAGA: Countervalues and sociological fractionation on Twitter as evidenced by pro- and anti-Trump discourses in relation to Covid-19

IF 2.3 2区 文学 Q1 COMMUNICATION Discourse Context & Media Pub Date : 2024-02-01 DOI:10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100758
Paul Cooper, Sofia Lampropoulou
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

This paper seeks to investigate the indexical links (Silverstein, 2003) to social values activated by terms like “covid” and “virus” in tweets from users with opposing political leanings. Our data comes from a corpus of 12,607 tweets collected in both May and August 2020. We focus on tweets containing “Trump”, as these occurred frequently throughout the corpus, to assess the ways in which Twitter users engage with discourses surrounding Covid-19 relative to the then-US President.

Focusing on the local contexts of the tweets we, first, demonstrate the contrasting social values indexed by specific keywords and hashtags. We refer to these as countervalues (Bearth, 2005) that illustrate the multiple and competing valorisations of terms for Covid-19 and which lead to the reproduction of two main contrasting discourses. The first illustrates that Covid-19 is “fake”, “a hoax”, and is explicitly linked indexically with China and tends to appear in tweets by pro-Trump users. A second set of discourses emerges in opposition to the pro-Trump tweets where categorisations of the virus as fake or a hoax are described by users as moronic, links to China are described as racist, and users demonstrate an explicitly anti-Trump ideology. We conclude that the recirculation of these discourses is evidence of sociological fractionation (Agha, 2007), as we see the pro-Trump group resisting the scheme of values put forward by the anti-Trump group. To this end, we contribute to the body of research that sheds light on the participatory frameworks enabled by social media affordances.

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中国病毒、孔子流感和 MAGA:推特上的反价值和社会学分化,从与 Covid-19 有关的支持和反对特朗普的言论中可见一斑
本文旨在研究政治倾向对立的用户在推文中使用的 "covid "和 "virus "等词与社会价值观之间的索引联系(Silverstein,2003)。我们的数据来自 2020 年 5 月和 8 月收集的 12,607 条推文语料库。我们重点关注包含 "特朗普 "的推文,因为这些推文在整个语料库中出现频率很高,以评估推特用户如何参与与时任美国总统相关的 "Covid-19 "讨论。我们将其称为 "反价值"(Bearth,2005 年),它说明了 Covid-19 术语的多重和竞争性价值,并导致了两种主要的对比性话语的再现。第一种论述表明,Covid-19 是 "假的"、"骗局",与中国有明确的索引联系,往往出现在亲特朗普用户的推文中。与支持特朗普的推文相对应,出现了第二组论述,用户将病毒归类为假的或骗局,将其描述为低能,将与中国的联系描述为种族主义,用户表现出明确的反特朗普意识形态。我们的结论是,这些论述的再循环是社会学分化的证据(Agha,2007 年),因为我们看到支持特朗普的群体抵制反特朗普群体提出的价值观方案。为此,我们将为揭示社交媒体所带来的参与性框架的研究做出贡献。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
Discourse Context & Media
Discourse Context & Media COMMUNICATION-
CiteScore
5.00
自引率
10.00%
发文量
46
审稿时长
55 days
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