Neu Dean, Saxton Gregory, Everett Jeffery, Shiraz Abu Rahaman
York University, Toronto, Canada.
University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada.
J Bus Ethics. 2020;162(2):473-485. doi: 10.1007/s10551-018-3997-9. Epub 2018 Aug 30.
The current study examines the micro-linguistic details of Twitter responses to the whistleblower-initiated publication of the Panama Papers. The leaked documents contained the micro-details of tax avoidance, tax evasion, and wealth accumulation schemes used by business elites, politicians, and government bureaucrats. The public release of the documents on April 4, 2016 resulted in a groundswell of Twitter and other social media activity throughout the world, including 161,036 Spanish-language tweets in the subsequent 5-month period. The findings illustrate that the responses were polyvocal, consisting a collection of overlapping speech genres with varied thematic topics and linguistic styles, as well as differing degrees of calls for action and varying amounts of illocutionary force. The analysis also illustrates that, while the illocutionary force of tweets is somewhat associated with the adoption of a prosaic and vernacular ethical stance as well as with demands for action, these types of voicing behaviors were not present in the majority of the tweets. These results suggest that, while social media platforms are a popular site for collective forms of voicing activities, it is less certain that these collective stakeholder voices necessarily result in forceful accountability demands that spill out of the communication medium and thus serve as an impulse for positive social change.
当前的研究考察了推特上对举报人曝光巴拿马文件一事的回应中的微观语言细节。这些泄露的文件包含了企业精英、政治家和政府官员所采用的避税、逃税和财富积累计划的微观细节。2016年4月4日这些文件的公开导致了推特及其他社交媒体在全球范围内的大量活动，在随后的5个月里有161,036条西班牙语推文。研究结果表明，这些回应是多声部的，由一系列重叠的话语类型组成，具有不同的主题和语言风格，以及不同程度的行动呼吁和不同量的言外之力。分析还表明，虽然推文的言外之力在一定程度上与采用平淡直白的道德立场以及行动要求相关，但这些发声行为在大多数推文中并不存在。这些结果表明，虽然社交媒体平台是集体发声活动的热门场所，但这些集体利益相关者的声音是否必然会产生强有力的问责要求，从而溢出传播媒介并成为积极社会变革的推动力，这一点并不确定。
