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Article published In: Conflict Talk in Spanish Digital Interactions
Edited by Lucía Fernández-Amaya
[Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 13:1] 2025
► pp. 127–153

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Attacking epistemic personhood on Twitter/X

A Spanish corpus-based examination

ORCiD logo with link | Universidad de Sevilla
Published online: 19 April 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00105.pad
Abstract
This paper reports on an examination of the actions that Spanish epistemic agents perform in order to question, challenge, undermine and/or destroy the epistemic personhood of an informer on Twitter, recently been renamed ‘X’. Relying on a corpus of reactions to information about sanitary measures released during the COVID-19 pandemic by an allegedly reliable and trustworthy information source, namely the Spanish Ministry of Health, the analysis looks into the said actions and how these are arranged in larger digital discourse sequences. While contributing to extant research on conflict talk in Spanish on social networks, the paper also aims to raise vulnerable epistemic agents’ awareness of the varied forms and dynamics of threats to epistemic personhood as a way of empowering them to identify and counteract such threats.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1Epistemic personhood
    • 2.2Attacking epistemic personhood
    • 2.3Conflict on Twitter/X
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1The corpus
    • 3.2Data analysis
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Actions attacking epistemic personhood
    • 4.2Number of moves in attacks to epistemic personhood
    • 4.3Move patterns
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
References (82)
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