Discursive Strategies of Blaming: The Language of Judgment and Political Protest Online

Abstract

Modern politics is permeated by blame games—symbolic struggles over the blameworthiness or otherwise of various social actors. In this article, we develop a framework for identifying different strategies of blaming that protesters use on social media to criticize and delegitimize governments and political leaders. We draw on the systemic functional linguistic theory of Appraisal to distinguish between blame attributions based on negative judgments of the target’s (1) capacity, such as references to their incompetence and policy failures; (2) veracity, questioning their truthfulness or honesty via references to deceitful character or dishonest acts and utterances; (3) propriety, questioning their moral standing by references to, for instance, corruption; and (4) tenacity, suggesting that the politicians are not dependable due to, for example, dithering. We add to this a further threefold distinction based on whether blaming is focused on the target’s (1) bad character, (2) bad behavior, or (3) negative outcomes that the target either caused or did not prevent from happening. To illustrate the approach, we analyze a corpus of replies by Twitter users to tweets by British government ministers about two highly contentious issues, Covid-19 and Brexit, in 2020–2021. We suggest that the methodology outlined here could provide a useful avenue for systematically revealing and comparing a variety of realizations of blaming in large datasets of online conflict talk, thereby providing a more fine-grained understanding of the practices of protest and delegitimation in modern politics.

Strategies of Blaming on Social Media: An Experimental Study of Linguistic Framing and Retweetability

“…From a discourse-analytic perspective, blaming involves the use of evaluative language to express negative judgement. We have suggested in our previous work (Hansson et al, 2022) that the linguistic framework of Appraisal—an established approach for exploring how linguistic patterns construct evaluation proposed by Martin and White (2005)—could be used to distinguish conventionalized ways of expressing blame. Martin and White (2005) group the linguistic resources for evaluating people’s character and behavior into two general categories.…”

“…The stimuli used in the sorting task were modelled on authentic tweets from a corpus compiled for a previous study of blaming discourse in the context of Brexit and Covid-19 (Hansson et al, 2022). From that corpus, we selected 18 representative examples, half of which contained blaming strategies based on negative judgements of social sanction (veracity) and half blaming strategies based on negative judgements of social esteem (capacity).…”

“…In reporting of negative events, the use of active rather than passive voice makes an agent mentioned in the story more likely to be regarded as deserving blame for causing that event (Fannes & Claeys, 2022; Knobloch-Westerwick & Taylor, 2008). Previous research focusing specifically on the language of judgement and blame suggests that distinct strategies can be identified on the basis of how negative evaluation is expressed linguistically (Hansson et al, 2022). It has highlighted two key aspects of interest: where blame is directed, whether it focuses on a person’s character, actions, or the outcomes of their actions, and why blame is assigned, whether it is due to perceived incompetence or a breach of integrity.…”