Dr. May Ahmar
Columbia University, The United States of America
This paper examines the linguistic and metalinguistic practices that activists on social networking sites (SNS) employed to posts, lexicon, and hashtags in order to circumvent censorship during the Palestine-Israel wars of 2021 and 2023-4. Activists posting about the conflict faced significant restrictions, including content removal, user blocking, and account deletions by major SNS for using specific words. Consequently, activists and platform users devised strategies to maintain access to their content. This study focuses on script-fusing, script-disconnecting, respelling, misspelling, and abbreviations as graphic and semiotic tools utilized by activists to keep their content accessible on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. The data is analyzed within the framework of graphic variation and graphic ideologies (Spitzmüller, 2015), and explored through a social semiotics approach (Sebba 2007, 2009). By incorporating Arabic graphemes into Latin-script words and vice versa, along with other strategies, activists reclaim power over language, lexicon, and the social spaces they inhabit. These practices occur within a landscape that both creates and reflects social meaning. This paper explores the graphic ideologies within the linguistic landscape that contribute to the creation of social meaning for these practices and their users. The practices illustrate differences in social value and support an ideology that subverts the hierarchical control exerted by powerful SNS over internet speech and freedom of expression, thereby reclaiming power within the same space.
Keywords: Script, Arabic, Meta/Instagram, X/Twitter, Censorship
The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The 10th International Conference on Languages, Linguistics, Translation and Literature (WWW.TLLL.IR), 1-2 February 2025, Ahwaz.
