Search

In this paper we analyse the (re)presentation of the economic crisis with special reference to Spain in messages on the electronic platform Twitter. As a social network, Twitter allows for an enormous cyberspace presence (Zhao and Rosson, 2009) and is therefore used as its preferred means of communication by companies, mass media, political parties and their leaders in order to spread their messages. By following the theoretical framework of propagandistic discourse developed by Charaudeau (2012), we will show why the use of hashtags such as #crisis, #austeridad, #banca, #escrache, #stopdesahucios or #paro guarantees accessing a wider number of cybernauts. Furthermore, the analysis of a corpus consisting of 1,800 tweets containing such hashtags can be taken as evidence for the existence of a rhetoric of persuasion on the electronic platform Twitter. Finally, we have identified the most common types of propaganda speech in relation to the hashtag used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]