Pragmatic Strategies in Digital Activism: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Language Use in Social Justice Movements

The present research project Adopts a corpus-based analytical prism to question the deliberate use of language by three prominent current social-justice movements: Black Lives Matter, Me Too and Extinction Rebellion. A series of intertwined questions are inquired in the inquiry: How do activists plan word selections with the aim to structure their grievances, achieve group solidarity, stimulate mass mobilization, and overcome digital barriers of censorship and governmental surveillance? To address these questions, the researcher demonstrates that activists regularly summon framing devices, politeness gambits, speech acts, and indirect signals in order to target diverse audiences seek both a collective identity and the means of promoting resistance to current regimes of power. Examples of timelines taken on social-media networks are examined to understand various rhetorical tactics in social awareness, namely punchy metaphors, visceral emotional cues, encompassing pronouns, and categorical commands to action, are used to represent the idea (or ideas) as well as to push reform in a certain direction. By bypassing algorithmic filters, activists use strategies such as irony, indirect phrasing, and euphemism, which enable their posts to remain accessible and widely shared across digital platforms. Overall, the findings lay pragmatic practices in the foreground as the driving force of online protest, as well as the node at which language, power and social change intersect in networked space. The findings add to the growing literature on corpus pragmatics and its contribution includes one that maps the pragmatic functions that are performed in digital activism. They also furnish a facts-based narrative of discourse which gives consideration to the special motivations and opportunities of digital protest. In the conclusion, the paper provides recommendations on the future research, cues on new platforms to study and new techniques of resistance to focus on to abate the extremely fast development of the nature of digital activism.