Beyond information-seeking: behabitive speech acts in social media news comments

Abstract

Social media platforms have become one of the primary arenas in which public reactions to current political and social developments are made visible. While existing literature suggests that user comments under news posts rarely function as spaces of verification, clarification, or reciprocal deliberation, less attention has been paid to the pragmatic mechanisms through which information-like claims circulate in these comments. Highly contested issues such as refugee policies make these pragmatic mechanisms particularly visible. Drawing on Austin’s speech act theory, this study adopts a pragmatic discourse analysis guided by Austin’s illocutionary taxonomy to examine the speech act patterns that stand out in Instagram news comments and to analyze through which illocutionary functions information-like content enters circulation. An analysis of 56 comments appearing under refugee-related Instagram posts shared by Fox News and TRT News on 9 May 2022 reveals that user discourse is largely shaped by emotional evaluations, sarcastic remarks, and inferential claims. The majority of statements formulated as questions do not function as genuine information requests. The analysis shows that the most dominant type of act in the comments consists of attitude-expressing utterances (behabitives). Explanatory or claim-based utterances (expositives and commissives) mostly function as unverified, speculative inferences. The study demonstrates that, rather than the verification of information, information-like claims produced alongside emotional attitudes gain visibility in social media news comments.