‘War against our Children’: Stance and evaluation in #BringBackOurGirls campaign discourse on Twitter and Facebook
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The #BringBackOurGirls social media campaign on Twitter and Facebook was not only a global
campaign for the release of the Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram, but also a campaign
for the rights of female children and girls to formal education. This article applies the appraisal
framework and (critical) discourse analysis to examine the discursive features of this campaign
and the role of affective stance in the evaluation of social actors in the campaign discourse.
Findings reveal that #BringBackOurGirls (https://twitter.com/hashtag/BringBackOurGirls?src=hash)
campaign exhibits a great deal of affect at the level of vocabulary reflecting moods, feelings and
emotional language in the representations of persons, groups and governments. Most of the
evaluations reflect negative valence, which is often typical of public reactions to (social) media
reports of crisis, or national disasters. The article argues that social media campaigns and activisms
can be fruitful if they are followed up by practical offline actions; otherwise, they will end up as
mere skacktivism. Some of the campaigners themselves argued that the campaign could not have
been successful if the girls were not rescued
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PE English