Scholars have showed concern in regard to how social media have transformed civic debate and the public sphere in our societies. The affordances of social media platforms work against more detailed and nuanced accounts of issues, favouring simplifications, buzzwords and forms of symbolism, as well as posts that are more provoking and extreme. It has been shown that the public is becoming fragmented into a range of mutually confirming interest groups, each with their own competing hashtags and social media channels. Such groups may be heterogeneous and shifting, yet come to occupy spaces where a limited vernacular of narratives create a self-confirming set of world views, where often even highly bloated claims go unchallenged.

In this presentation, I explore how Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) can offer a contribution to this growing literature. MCDA provides a set of tools that allow us to draw out what we can think of as the 'discursive scripts' carried on any hashtag. This simply means the kind of issues being raised on the hashtag, who is represented as being involved, with what kinds of aims, priorities, outcomes and causalities. MCDA allows us to explore such representations in the language, images, graphics and videos posted on hashtags. In MCDA, we can then compare the discursive script found on the hashtag with the actual events that are being represented.

Here, I look at a case study of an instance of social activism on Twitter/X, where users mobilized to support the women of Afghanistan when the US abandoned the country to the Taliban in 2021. I first explain the nature of the situation for women in Afghanistan at the time. Following this, I draw out the discursive script carried on the hashtags. This well-intentioned activism misrepresents local realities for Afghan women and rather carries hugely ethnocentric ideas about self-empowerment, freedom, and having the individual right to ‘voice’.

Bouvier, G., & Machin, D. (2023). #Stand with women in Afghanistan: Civic participation, symbolism, and morality in political activism on Twitter. Discourse & Communication, aop. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/17504813231174802

Gwen Bouvier (PhD, University of Wales) is a Professor at Shanghai International Studies University, Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications. Her main research interests are digital communication and civic debate on social media. Professor Bouvier's publications have drawn on critical discourse analysis, multimodality based on social semiotics, and online ethnography. She is the Associate Editor for Social Semiotics and Book Review Editor for Discourse & Society. Her latest publications include the book Qualitative Research Using Social Media, Routledge 2022 and the articles ‘Visually representing Cervical Cancer in a government social media health campaign in China: moralizing and abstracting women’s sexual health’ (Visual Communication, 2023); ‘Where Neoliberalism shapes Confucian notions of child rearing: influencers, experts and discourses of intensive parenting on Chinese Weibo’ (Discourse, Context and Media, 2022); and ‘#Stand with women in Afghanistan: Civic participation, symbolism, and morality in political activism on Twitter’ (Discourse and Communication, 2023).