Actual science and poisoned people: Identity and (im)politeness on two oppositional Facebook Pages about fluoridation

Community water fluoridation (CWF) is a public health measure which has attracted seemingly intractable political and moral conflict since its inception in the mid-20th century. Following the advent of social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook, researchers have investigated SNS content about CWF, but the focus is primarily quantitative, leaving a gap in the research for qualitative analysis of the SNS discourse of CWF partisans. In this thesis I analyse the discourse of commenters and moderators on two New Zealand-based Facebook Pages taking opposite stances on the CWF issue, to investigate how commenters make sense of the CWF dispute and construct their identity as partisans in the conflict, and how they interact with other partisans. I use a theoretical foundation of Laclau and Mouffe’s Discourse Theory, which provides an ontology of the discursive construction of meaning and identity, the nature of political conflicts and the relationship between meaning, identity and the political that incorporates concepts from structural linguistics, post-Marxist political theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis. To this foundation I articulate the analytical approaches of the Appraisal framework and third-wave (im)politeness theories. Appraisal helps reveal identities, values, and other elements of the discourse through analysing how speakers/authors use evaluative and epistemic stance to position themselves and others in relation to meanings being expressed. (Im)politeness analysis contributes further insights by revealing how partisanship is constructed through face and rapport work and the giving and taking of offence. Third-wave (im)politeness theories acknowledge both the situated nature of (im)politeness and the regularities in how (im)politeness is performed, allowing for analysis that takes account of contextual factors and the use of strategies with conventionally (im)polite force.

The findings show that the opposing camps orient to their opposition as an antagonistic opponent whose values are diametrically opposed to their own, and who poses a moral threat to society. More specifically, commenters construct partisan identities through discursive strategies based on negative attitude towards discursive elements associated with the opposition; through dialogic positioning that distances from the opposition while aligning with allies; through lexical choices that naturalise partisan stances and index subject positions equated with partisan identity; and through pervasive conventionalised and implicational impoliteness towards opposition commenters. The polarised and deindividuated context makes only partisan identities salient and collapses any distinction between individual and collective identity; thus, interpersonal impoliteness constitutes retaliation to the collective moral threat that the target represents, commensurate with recent research on the relationship between identity threat, moral threat and (im)politeness in deindividuated contexts. However, each camp constructs the discourse slightly differently: anti-CWF partisans’ discourse is organised around the health and moral threat posed by fluoride, while that of pro-CWF partisans is organised around the absolute epistemic and moral authority of science, with unscientific worldviews posing a moral threat.

The salience throughout commenters’ interactions of identification with partisan identities, and impoliteness to those positioned as belonging to the opposition, suggests that performatively identifying with a partisan subject position that symbolises a set of moral values that contrasts with the morally threatening opponent is the primary force of these commenters’ interactions, ahead of advancing pro- or anti-CWF objectives. This reflects the involvement of fantasmatic attachment driving the subject to identify with a particular subject position. As the antagonistic opponent simultaneously threatens partisan identity and forms the constitutive outside by which it is defined, hostility to opponents becomes a core part of partisan identity performance.

This thesis has a number of research implications. As well as adding to the literature on the CWF dispute as a qualitative analysis of online CWF discourse, it also furthers the project of operationalising Discourse Theory for linguistic discourse analysis through demonstrating that it can be productively articulated with Appraisal and (im)politeness approaches. It also demonstrates potential synergies between Appraisal and (im)politeness approaches for analysing polylogic interactions.