Appraisal Analysis of Political Stance: Turning Point USA and Occupy Democrats Facebook Page towards Charlie Kirk
Abstract
The study investigates the representation of political stance towards Charlie Kirk through evaluative language in the Turning Point USA and Occupy Democrat’s facebook page. The study applies Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005) within a qualitative case study design and interpretative paradigm. The data consist of captions and overlay captions taken from two institutional organization facebook pages domains about Charlie Kirk: Turning Point USA and Occupy Democrats. The findings reveal that political stance is constructed through glorification, accusations, manipulation through constant posts that express and amplify those acts of glorification, accusations, manipulation . Using the Haidt framework of moral foundations as a way to represent the discourse political stance through the six main foundations within the framework, the foundations of loyalty/betrayal,authority/subversion,sanctity/degradation emerged as the dominant foundations. Furthermore, the findings also reveal that modern digital politics is not mainly driven by policies and facts with actual data. Instead it uses emotional moral outrage and manipulating the political figures' image to trigger deep psychological feelings that lead to the public blindly attacking or defending that specific political figure, much likely defending their own family. This study demonstrates how evaluative language functions ideologically in constructing political stance within digital space.
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.31764/telaah.v11i2.41209
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