“We will get you”: linguistic ideology, power, and the distortion of meaning in Twitter discourse

Isabel Picornell

Autores

Isabel Picornell English

Palavras-chave:

Twitter, threats, context, discourse analysis, narrativity

Resumo

This is a case study of the meaning of a tweet by @KyleHibbee007 in the context of the 2021 Scottish Parliamentary elections. As a consequence of the tweet’s wording, KyleHibee07 was charged with and convicted in an Edinburgh (Scotland) court of threatening behaviour towards unionist politician @georgegalloway. This study explores how the architecture of Twitter facilitates the distortion of meaning when tweets are decontextualised, the vulnerability of subtle meaning when tweets are recontextualised, and the role that power and linguistic ideologies in conflict play in distorting meaning. Analysis employs multi-level discourse, context, pragmatic, and narrativity approaches to the Twitter discourse and proposes alternative non-threatening interpretations to KyleHibee07’s tweet when is interpreted in the context of the thread in which it was originally nested. Finally, the article argues for greater awareness by institutional authorities when making legal judgements on disputed meaning on how discourse is created and consumed culturally and socially.

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Referências

Acknowledgements:

I thank Sean Wilkin KC for his advice on the construction of the tweet narrative, and Professor Tim Grant (AIFL) and Professor Marketa Trimble (UNLV) for their advice and feedback on this article.

Conflict of Interest Statement:

The author was instructed in 2022 by @KyleHibee07’s Defence solicitor to produce an expert report on the range of interpretations that could be applied to the tweet written by @KyleHibee07. All the tweets, including the @KyleHibee07 post, were collected by the author and were publicly available at the time of collection in 2022. The author received no remuneration in any form for the analysis and report, and neither the author nor the report was used as expert evidence at @KyleHibee07’s trial. Otherwise, no other association exists between @KyleHibee07, and anyone else associated with him or the trial, and the author.

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