Article published In:
Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict: Online-First Articles

Degrees of disagreement and reliability of information sources in pro- and anti-vaccination comments on Facebook

ORCID logo | Universitat de València
ORCID logo | Universitat de València

During the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, the Spanish Ministry of Health shared informative posts on platforms like Facebook, sparking heated debates. This paper utilizes a custom corpus of Facebook comments with evidential elements to explore the disagreement and confrontation in online comments from pro- and anti-vaccine advocates. The study also analyses the types of evidence employed by posters to support their positions, revealing potential hierarchies of information sources in terms of reliability and validity.

Findings indicate that anti-vaccine advocates (i) engage in stronger disagreement than vaccine supporters; (ii) use disqualification and hostile speech acts slightly more; and (iii) employ more impolite strategies. Moreover, the study shows differences between these two user groups with regard to the sources of the information they chose to use: anti-vaccine posters employ a higher percentage of more objective types of evidence, while pro-vaccine posters resort to evidence based on more subjective, and personal sources.

Keywords: disagreement, evidentiality, conflict, social media discourse, COVID-19 vaccine
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1The discourse of Facebook pages
    • 2.2Disagreement
    • 2.3Evidentiality and reliability
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Sampling procedure and data
    • 3.2Analytical procedure
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Degree of disagreement and confrontation
    • 4.2Sources of knowledge and reliability of evidence
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 April 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00106.kot
References (44)
Albelda, Marta
2015 “Evidentiality in Non-Evidential Languages: Are There Evidentials in Spanish?”. Journal of Pragmatics 851: 135–137. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Angouri, Jo, and Theodora Tseliga
2010 “You HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT!” from e-disagreement to e-impoliteness in Two Online Fora”. Journal of Politeness Research 6(1): 57–82. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bach, Kent, and Robert Harnish
1979 Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge Mass.: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Bermúdez, Fernando
2005 Evidencialidad. La codificación lingüística del punto de vista. PhD diss. Stockholms Universitet.
Blanco, Antonio
2008 “Cómo hacer cosas malas con las palabras: actos ilocucionarios hostiles y los fundamentos de la teoría actos de habla (‘How to do bad things with words: hostile illocutionary acts and the basics of speech act theory’).” Crítica 40(118): 3–27.Google Scholar
Bousfield, Derek
2008 Impoliteness in Interaction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bou-Franch, Patricia, and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich
2018 “Relational Work in Multimodal Networked Interactions on Facebook.” Internet Pragmatics 1(1): 134–160. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2020 “Socioeconomic Variation and Conflict in Spanish Retailer-Consumer Interactions on Facebook.” In Pragmatic Variation in Service Encounter Interactions across the Spanish- Speaking World, ed. by César Félix-Brasdesfer and Maria Elena Placencia, 189–206. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
boyd, danah, and Alice Marwick
2011 “Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens’ Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies.” Work in Progress Paper for Discussion at the Privacy Law Scholars Conference on June 2, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Boye, Kasper, and Peter Harder
2009 “Evidentiality: Linguistic Categories and Grammaticalization”. Functions of Language 16(1): 9–43. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brenes, Ester
2009 La agresividad verbal y sus mecanismos de expresión en el español actual. PhD diss. Sevilla University.
2015 “Aproximación pragmalingüística a las unidades modales empleadas en la expresión de la disensión y la descalificación”. Rilce 31(1): 22–51. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Briz, Antonio, and Val.Es.Co. Group
2014 “Las unidades del discurso oral. La propuesta Val.Es.Co. de segmentación de la conversación (coloquial).” Estudios de Lingüística del Español 35(1): 13–73. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson
1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chafe, Wallace
1986 “Evidentiality in English Conversation and Academic Writing.” In Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology, ed. by Wallace Chafe, and Johanna Nichols, 261–272. New Jersey: Ablex.Google Scholar
Chierichetti, Luisa
2016 “Oralidad digital, identidad verbal y descortesía en las páginas Facebook de festivales de música”. Oralia 51: 1–16.Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan
2011 Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dehkordi, Mojdeh, and Hamid Allami
2012 “Evidentiality in Academic Writing”. Theory and Practice in Language Studies 2(9):1895–1904. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Diewald, Gabriele, and Elena Smirnova
2010 “Introduction. Evidentiality in European Languages: the Lexical-Grammatical Distinction”. In Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology, ed. by Wallace Chafe and Johanna Nichols, 1–14. New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Estellés, Maria, and Marta Albelda
2018 “On the Dynamicity of Evidential Scales. Pragmatic Indirectness in Evidentiality as a Rhetoric Strategy in Academic and Political Discourse”. In Perspectives on Evidentiality in Spanish. Explorations across Genres, ed. by Carolina Figueras, and Adrián Cabedo, 25–49. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Faller, Martina
2002 “Remarks on Evidential Hierarchies”. In The Construction of Meaning, ed. by David Beaver, Luis Casillas, Brady Clark, and Stephan Kaufmann, 37–59. Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Fernández-Amaya, Lucía
2019 “Disagreement and (Im)politeness in a Spanish Family Members’ WhatsApp Group”. Russian Journal of Linguistics 23(4): 1065–1087. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Frawley, William
1992 Linguistic Semantics. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Kakavá, Christina
1993 “Conflicting Argumentative Strategies in the Classroom”. In Georgetown University Round Table 1993, ed. by James Alatis, 395–414. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Kotthoff, Helga
1993 “Disagreement and Concession in Disputes: on the Context Sensitivity of Preference Structures”. Language in Society 221: 193–216. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2019 La evidencialidad en el artículo científico. Berlin: Peter Lang. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labinaz, Paolo, and Marina Sbisà
2021 “The Problem of Knowledge Dissemination in Social Network Discussions”. Journal of Pragmatics 1751: 67–80. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey
1983 Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Locher, Miriam A.
2004 Power and Politeness in Action: Disagreements in Oral Communication. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mancera, Ana, and Ana Pano
2020 La opinión pública en la red. Análisis pragmático de la voz de los ciudadanos. Iberoamericana-Vervuert. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marwick, Alice, and dannah boyd
2011 “I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter Posters, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience.” New Media & Society 13(1): 114–133. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Parmelee, John, and Shannon Bichard
2012 Politics and the Twitter Revolution: How Tweets Influence the Relationship Between Political Leaders and the Public. Lanham: Lexington Books.Google Scholar
Plungian, Vladimir
2010 “Types of Verbal Evidentiality Marking: an Overview.” In Linguistic Realization of Evidentiality in European Languages, ed. by Gabriele Diewald and Elena Smirnova, 15–58. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sanmartín, Julia
2014 “A propósito de los cibergéneros: el portal oficial de turismo de España spain.info y el Facebook institucional See Spain como objeto de análisis.” Lingüística Española Actual XXXVI (1): 5–34.Google Scholar
2019 “Análisis contrastivo de la (des)cortesía en los comentarios digitales del periódico 20minutos.es y del Facebook de viajacontumascota.com: anonimato y comunidad virtual.” ELUA 331: 173–194. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah
1984 “Jewish argument as sociability”. Language in Society 131: 311–335. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Scott, Suzanne
2002 “Linguistic Feature Variation within Disagreements: An Empirical Investigation.” Text 22(2): 301–328.Google Scholar
Sifianou, Maria
2012 “Disagreements, Face and Politeness.” Journal of Pragmatics 44(12): 1554–1564. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Squartini, Mario
2008 “Lexical vs Grammatical Evidentiality in French and Italian.” Linguistics 46(5): 917–947. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sunstein, Cass R.
2002 “The Law of Group Polarization”. The Journal of Political Philosophy, 10(2): 175–195. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vivas, Julia, and Susana Ridao
2015 “ ‘Lo siento pero me parecen horribles!!!’: análisis pragmalingüístico de la descortesía en la red social Facebook.” Revista de Filología 331: 217–236.Google Scholar
Whitt, Richard
2010 Evidentiality and Perception Verbs in English and German. Berlin: Peter Lang. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Willet, Thomas
1988 “A Cross-Linguistic Survey of the Grammaticalization of Evidentiality.” Studies in Language 12(1): 51–97. DOI logoGoogle Scholar