Twitter Impoliteness Metadiscourse and the Political Domain

Defying social norms of verbal conduct can be perceived as a risk to reputation, particularly in the political sphere. Taking this into view, our aim is to discover how Twitter1 users reacted to the formula “son of a bitch”, employed by US President Biden at a press conference. The theoretical background of the study relies on the theories of impoliteness and the Principle of Impoliteness Reciprocity. Our data comes from the tweets published as a reply to journalist Doocy after he commented on the episode. Another episode, involving insults in the political domain, was also examined to expand the findings. It happened when Philippine President Duterte cursed Barack Obama in a live speech. In both occasions, the findings point to the legitimization of impolite behaviors in political discourse, which were framed as instances of counter-impoliteness. As for the impoliteness metadicourse, it was populated with insults, unpalatable questions, and playful language. The findings suggest that the process of “normalization of shameless language” may be underway on Twitter.