Description du projet
Le jeu des reproches sur Twitter
Pour apaiser les citoyens lors de la mise en vigueur de politiques controversées, certains gouvernements recourent à une stratégie de communication appelée rejet de la responsabilité. Toutefois, nous en savons peu sur les utilisations et les implications de cette stratégie dans les médias sociaux. Le projet BAIT, financé par l’UE, permettra de fournir de nouvelles connaissances concernant ce type de communication. Il étudiera Twitter, un média social influent largement utilisé par les politiciens, les activistes et les électeurs pour véhiculer leurs idées. Le projet se focalise sur le Brexit, en tant qu’exemple concret de la manière dont les gouvernements sont susceptibles de réagir à de fortes controverses. BAIT identifiera les fonctions discursives du rejet de la responsabilité utilisées sur Twitter, il étudiera la manière dont les différentes formes de cette stratégie peuvent affecter les populations, et il communiquera les résultats de ces recherches à un large public.
Objectif
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.
Programme(s)
Régime de financement
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinateur
B15 2TT Birmingham
Royaume-Uni