A discourse analytic study of #FixTheCountry on Ghanaian Twitter

Nartey, Mark; Yu, Yating

Abstract

This article analyzes tweets produced during the “fix the country” campaign on Ghanaian Twitter. It illustrates how the affordances of social media can empower campaigners and how linguistic choices, even on digital platforms, can be conditioned by sociocultural context, spatiotemporal factors, and local politics. The findings reveal three main discursive strategies utilized in the tweets to construct the protest as a discourse of contestation intended to resist social inequalities and promote a shared vision: (1) depicting the Ghanaian government as irresponsible, (2) portraying the Ghanaian people as victims, and (3) issuing a clarion call to action. These strategies were framed with various linguistic resources, and they enabled the protesters to recruit support for their objectives, mobilize the masses for social action, and lay the foundation for an offline demonstration. The article holds implications for the burgeoning scholarship on framing processes and the discursive strategies of online social movements.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Dec 5, 2022
• Online Publication Date: Jan 3, 2023
• Publication Date: 2023-01
• Deposit Date: Jan 3, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 3, 2023
• Journal: Social Media and Society
• Electronic ISSN: 2056-3051
• Publisher: SAGE Publications (UK and US)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 9
• Issue: 1
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221147328
• Keywords: discourse of resistance; collective action; digital activism; online social movement; social media critical discourse studies
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10278967
• Publisher URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20563051221147328