Speaking Truth to Power: Twitter Reactions to the Panama Papers

Abstract

The current study examines the micro-linguistic details of Twitter responses to the whistleblower-initiated publication of the Panama Papers. The leaked documents contained the micro-details of tax avoidance, tax evasion, and wealth accumulation schemes used by business elites, politicians, and government bureaucrats. The public release of the documents on April 4, 2016 resulted in a groundswell of Twitter and other social media activity throughout the world, including 161,036 Spanish-language tweets in the subsequent 5-month period. The findings illustrate that the responses were polyvocal, consisting a collection of overlapping speech genres with varied thematic topics and linguistic styles, as well as differing degrees of calls for action and varying amounts of illocutionary force. The analysis also illustrates that, while the illocutionary force of tweets is somewhat associated with the adoption of a prosaic and vernacular ethical stance as well as with demands for action, these types of voicing behaviors were not present in the majority of the tweets. These results suggest that, while social media platforms are a popular site for collective forms of voicing activities, it is less certain that these collective stakeholder voices necessarily result in forceful accountability demands that spill out of the communication medium and thus serve as an impulse for positive social change.

Illocutionary Acts of Directive on Lazada_Id Advertising in the Instagram

“…Matching method is a method that determines the tool is out of language, detached and not part of the language in question [9]. To help understand the attributes and consequences of activities that exist on social media, in this case all will depend on work rooted in linguistic disciplines [10]. In which Specifically, this research uses a pragmatic sub-method and data reduction method which is used to analyze the meaning and purpose of speech acts that exist in the advertisement of Lazada_Id on social networks (Instagram) and also filter out data that is not needed.…”

Social Accountability Between Consensus and Confrontation: Developing a Theoretical Framework for Societal Accountability Relationships of Public Sector Organizations

“…While the introduction of Web 2.0 and social network technologies has changed the daily lives of citizens, it further changes the lines of communication between citizens and governments (Bekkers et al, 2011). New and online media have the potential to create an online public sphere, in which public opinion is formed and claims are made against public institutions (Neu et al, 2020). Social media platforms have helped “to aggregate and organize individual voices in ways that contributed to the emergence of stakeholder groupings that spoke [.…”

“….] in the name of ‘we the people’” (Neu et al, 2020, p. 482). Social media could be a dominant venue for the public scrutiny of public officials, although its effects on public sector behavior still have to be seen (Djerf-Pierre & Pierre, 2016).…”

Non-pharmaceutical Interventions and the Infodemic on Twitter: Lessons Learned from Italy during the Covid-19 Pandemic

“…Research on emergency management shows that Twitter has been used to improve situational awareness among communities [ 22 ]. It can inform local communities given emergency alerts [ 19 ], and can act as a tool to facilitate social and political trends for change during emergencies when emotions embolden people [ 23 ].…”