Descripción del proyecto
El juego de acusaciones en Twitter
Para apaciguar a los ciudadanos cuando se aplican políticas impopulares, algunos gobiernos recuren a una estrategia de comunicación denominada evasión de la culpa. Sin embargo, se sabe muy poco sobre los usos e implicaciones de esta estrategia en las redes sociales. El proyecto financiado con fondos europeos BAIT brindará nuevos conocimientos sobre este tipo de comunicación. Para ello, estudiará Twitter, dado que se trata de un canal de comunicación social influyente y de uso generalizado entre políticos, activistas y votantes. El proyecto se centra en el «brexit» al considerarlo un ejemplo fundamental sobre la forma en que los gobiernos pueden reaccionar a un grave riesgo de culpa. BAIT identificará los rasgos discursivos de la evasión de la culpa empleados en Twitter, investigará cómo distintas formas de evasión de la culpa pueden afectar a los ciudadanos y comunicará los hallazgos de la investigación a un público muy heterogéneo.
Objetivo
Blame avoidance is a key communication strategy used by government officials when they initiate unpopular policies, but has not yet been studied for its use in social media. ‘Blame Avoidance in Twitter’ (BAIT) is a project which generates new knowledge about this important form of communication by analysing data from Twitter as an influential site used by politicians, activists and citizens. We take the recent, controversial decision of the British government to leave the European Union, as a timely and high-scale case study which offers lessons to other European countries about how governments may respond to acute blame risk. The objectives of BAIT are: (1) to establish and quantify the discursive features of blame avoidance used in Twitter debates; (2) to evaluate the effects of blame avoidance expressed in Twitter, through analysing the responses that arise in the form of replies and retweets; (3) to investigate how blame avoidance affects how people think and feel; (4) to disseminate the findings of the project to academics and the wider public, including politicians and activists. We will achieve this with an interdisciplinary approach which bridges the macro-social interests of political science and micro-analytic foci of linguistics, using mixed methods in a series of three studies. The first study uses corpus linguistics to quantify the forms of blame avoidance in a specialised corpus created from Twitter hashtag threads related to Brexit. The second study analyses replies to tweets containing blame avoidance, using critical discourse analysis to analyse the extent to which such posts gain support or criticism. The third study uses in an online survey experimental task to examine how the language used in blame avoidance affects citizens’ perceptions of politicians. The results of BAIT will be published in articles, an edited collection and a series of public engagement activities.
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinador
B15 2TT Birmingham
Reino Unido