Impoliteness in Twitter Discourse: a Case Study of Replies to Donald Trump and Greta Thunberg

Abstract

Twitter (X) is a popular social media platform that allows users to express their opinions and interact on various topics, including politics. However, Twitter can provide a space for impolite and aggressive language use, especially when the issues are controversial or polarizing. This study analyzes the replies to two controversial and similar tweets, namely Donald Trump’s tweet to Greta Thunberg and Greta Thunberg’s tweet to Donald Trump. Ninety-seven tweets that impolitely took issue with the original tweets were collected and coded for their moral order themes and pragmatic functions. Culpeper’s (2011) impoliteness framework was consulted as a threshold to include or exclude reply tweets in the data analysis. The results show that the replies invoked moral order expectations in three overarching categories in the responses to both parties: age-appropriate behavior, respect and manners, and concern for the common good. As far as the pragmatic functions were concerned, criticism of personal characteristics, criticism of supporters, criticism of relatives (to Trump only), praise of the opposing party, directing, mockery, and ideology denial (to Thunberg only) were performed. The study discusses how users took offense through language in a highly polarized political context.

Keywords

• moral order
• pragmatic function
• strategies
• impoliteness
• Twitter
• offense