Online hate propaganda during election period: The case of Macedonia

Zorica Trajkova; Silvana Neshkovska

doi:10.1515/lpp-2018-0015

Article

Online hate propaganda during election period: The case of Macedonia

Zorica Trajkova
Zorica Trajkova is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the Department of English Language and Literature at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. Her research interests are mainly in the area of pragmatics and critical discourse analysis. She is a co-author of Speech acts: requesting, thanking, apologizing and complaining in Macedonian and English (Akademski Pechat, Skopje, 2014). She has published internationally in linguistic journals and volumes (e.g. Research in English and Applied Linguistics REAL Studies 8, Graduate Academic Writing in Europe in Comparison, Cuvillier Verlag, Göttingen, Germany, 2015; International Journal of Education TEACHER, 2017, 2018; Contexts, Novi Sad, 2013 etc.).
and Silvana Neshkovska
Silvana Neshkovska is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Education, “St. Kliment Ohridski” University in Bitola. Her main field of interest is pragmatics and she has published research papers on expressing verbal irony in various scientific journals (Acta Neophilologica; Linguistics, Culture and Identity in Foreign Language Education; Teacher International Journal (IJET), International Journal of Language and Linguistics (IJLL),International Journal of Applied Language Studies and Culture, etc.).

Published/Copyright: December 18, 2018

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From the journal Lodz Papers in Pragmatics Volume 14 Issue 2

Abstract

The paper offers a critical discursive and pragmatic analysis of a corpus of hateful Facebook and Twitters status updates of politicians, political activists and voters in the 2016 pre-and-post election period, in Macedonia. Aiming to determine how power is exerted on social media, the paper focuses on identifying the stance social media users take when posting messages with political content. The analysis first attempted to unveil what speech acts the hateful posts are predominantly composed of (e.g. assertive, directives, expressives), what roles the authors of the posts normally assume, who the hateful political discourse in the given socio-political context is directed to, as well as what are some of the predominant linguistic strategies underlying the analysed hateful comments. The results show that, by using mostly assertive and expressive speech acts, social media users assume mainly the roles of analysts and judges and only subsequently the one of activists, they mostly address politicians directly and they use a lot of negative lexis, rhetorical figures and boosters as interpersonal metadiscourse markers to express their negative stance and exert power and dominance.

Key words: hate speech; elections; speech acts; stance; positioning; power; propaganda

About the authors

Zorica Trajkova

Zorica Trajkova is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the Department of English Language and Literature at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. Her research interests are mainly in the area of pragmatics and critical discourse analysis. She is a co-author of Speech acts: requesting, thanking, apologizing and complaining in Macedonian and English (Akademski Pechat, Skopje, 2014). She has published internationally in linguistic journals and volumes (e.g. Research in English and Applied Linguistics REAL Studies 8, Graduate Academic Writing in Europe in Comparison, Cuvillier Verlag, Göttingen, Germany, 2015; International Journal of Education TEACHER, 2017, 2018; Contexts, Novi Sad, 2013 etc.).

Silvana Neshkovska

Silvana Neshkovska is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Education, “St. Kliment Ohridski” University in Bitola. Her main field of interest is pragmatics and she has published research papers on expressing verbal irony in various scientific journals (Acta Neophilologica; Linguistics, Culture and Identity in Foreign Language Education; Teacher International Journal (IJET), International Journal of Language and Linguistics (IJLL),International Journal of Applied Language Studies and Culture, etc.).

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Published Online: 2018-12-18

Published in Print: 2018-12-19

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/lpp-2018-0015

Keywords for this article

hate speech; elections; speech acts; stance; positioning; power; propaganda