Chahira Ben Abdallah

This research addresses the Arab media discourse related to
the Lebanese-Israeli war in July 2006, one of the recent Arab crises
falling within the long-standing Arab-Israeli conflict, and involving the
territorial and international balances as well as the geopolitical plans
targeting the Middle-East region, especially after the September 11,
2001 events.
This research falls within the discourse theory that deals with
the text as a producer of a new reality shaped by the interlocutor’s
perceptions, arguments and references that rest upon the cognitive
system shared by the sender and the receiver.
Based on this theoretical premise, the research addresses the
cognitive approaches of the media as cognitive coding tools that reshape events through reconfiguring knowledge and producing « the
reality of the reality ». These approaches call to the mind the theory
and perceptions of social representations which we have employed to
examine the role of the media discourse in constructing and interpreting
the reality and in shaping the receiver’s behavior.
Premised upon these perceptions, we have identified our main
research question : according to which communication strategies the
Arab media represented the 2006 Lebanese-Israeli war And what were
the communication strategies adopted? Language, representations
and references are identified as the three levels of research. We
have, accordingly, determined the techniques and tools of pragmatic
discourse analysis: analysis of discursive modalities, analysis of the
argumentation process, analysis of the active forces, and analysis of the
references, in addition to the study of the choice of words, terminology
and information strategy978

This study deals with disinformation and algorithmic suppression as two
faces of ―digital militarization. It is based on the concept of ―discursive hegemony and critical discourse studies to compare between the construction of the misleading Israeli discourse and the algorithmic banning strategies of pro-Palestine contents.
The study examined samples of misleading information that circulated in the beginning of the Israeli war on Gaza in 2023 to understand its discursive strategies, meanings and representations and also to understand the aspects of discursive hegemony in the algorithmic censorship patterns used by social media.
The study found out that the cognitive reinforcement of the prevailing narrative about the conflict derives its rhetorical power from the rapid flow of disinformation. It found also that the power of the Israeli story does not lie in the strength of the discourse structure it was promoting; rather, it lies in controlling the technical and communication context that transmits this narrative and gives it ―preference of access‖ owing to the power relations that the Israeli propaganda machine holds with social media companies.
Keywords : Disinformation - Algorithmic Oppression - Digital Militarism - Discursive Hegemony - The Israeli Narrative

تحاول هذه المقالة تقصّي ملامح الأجندة المحذوفة في المعالجة الإعلامية التي اعتمدتها وسائل الإعلام الغربية الرئيسية لحرب غزّة. وهي معالجة تتلقّف الرواية الإسرائيلية وتعيد إنتاجها في ظلّ منع الاحتلالالإسرائيلي مراسلي الصحافة الأجنبية من الوجود في قطاع غزّة لتقديم رواية مغايرة.

تدعو مجلة خطابات الباحثين إلى إنجاز دراسات تحليلية نقدية لخطابات المنصات الاجتماعية الرقمية، وتقديمها للنشر في عددها التاسع المزمع نشره في يوليو 2024. وتدعو الباحثين في حقول معرفية متنوعة إلى دراسة هذه الخطابات في ضوء الأطر النظرية (النظرية النقدية، الدراسات الثقافية، الاقتصاد السياسي النقدي...) والمنهجية لتحليل الخطاب النقدي (مقاربات التحليل النقدي للخطاب لكلّ من "فاركلوف" و"فان دايك"، وتحليل الخطاب النقدي متعدّد الوسائط، تحليل الخطاب التكنوثقافي النقدي، بلاغة الجمهور، والتحليل الإيجابي للخطاب...)

In this study, we have tried to approach hatred as a political emotion, to observe its linguistic and rhetorical indicators, and to understand its argumentative purposes, with an eye to examining its performativity and its inciting power in connection with the context of political polarization in Tunisia since President Kais Saied announced the July 25 measures. We have monitored the linguistic, lexical and argumentative techniques indicating hate in the speeches of "electronic clans" both supporting and opposing the project of President "Sayed" as well as its polarizing steps and meanings.
We observed how the language describing the other, turns into a stigmatizing language and how the image’s language, occults hate and practices distortion and ugliness. We found that the lexicography of hate in both discourses reveal the stereotypical reductionist nature of hate speech, which is not always manifested in its explicit form, and we concluded that incitement in hate speech on Facebook is an extension of the hate expressions and categories used by politicians in their political discourse.

In this study, we have approached the "hashtags" in connexion with the war in Gaza and the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in 2021 as “rhetorical responses” that prompted a popular resistance discourse.
After a critical thinking about the medialization of the hashtag of war, we have tried to analyze the most trending hashtags on social media in the light of critical discourse analysis and the theory of "public rhetoric". This analysis aims to testing the ability of these hashtags to producing an anti-discourse and creating a public opinion that will pressurize international decision-makers, and liberate the global consciousness from Israeli lies. We concluded that the meaning production process followed by the texts of the hashtags are based on a news assumptions describing the reality of the situation and calling for change. These assumptions foreground the victim while putting the actors and their responsibility in the background. They are, also, unable to fill the empty mental spaces of the Western receiver and to provide the appropriate knowledge background to enable them to understand the context of the conflict.
Thus, hashtags were a resistance response to the power of blockades, piracy and filtration, rather than a rhetorical response, despite the noticeable interaction with them in the Arab region or abroad. The role of these responses in revealing the strategies of disinformation and distortion in the dominant media discourses, confronting their fallacies, and immunizing world public opinion from their authoritarian rhetoric still limited.
Key words: hashtags- the Palestinian cause - resistance – medialization- rhetorical responses – critical discourse analysis

Our research aims to examine what lies beyond the textual function of some satirical critical contents published on a number of Tunisian Facebook pages and to reveal their performative and communicative dimensions.
We have dealt with irony as an argumentative, narrative, and representative process that can build a vision of the world and draw the image of the self and the other within this world.
We based our semiotic-linguistic analysis on an integrative approach that combines the narrative semiotics by« Graimas » and the sociological textual analysis by " Fairclough". And so,  we understood the profound structure of these contents of disapproving messages and expressive energy based on capturing paradoxes and maneuvering the linguistic techniques and common social codes among Tunisians to construct social reality, in a cynical way, diagnosing the shortcomings of this reality and undermining the authority's discourse.

This study examines to what extent the contents shared by Tunisian personal accounts on the social network site Facebook reflect the characteristics of the basic Tunisian personality as defined by Professor Moncef Ouannes.
This study keep away  from focusing on the question: how does Facebook affect the behavior of individuals and groups socially, politically and culturally? And that is in order to move on this question: How does the cultural personality affect the nature of these contents on Facebook?
The study aims to dig into the cultural and psychological connotations that mobilize the use of Tunisians of the social network site Facebook or to look into the anthropological implications of these uses.

This study aims, in addition, to discover new cognitive pathways to study social networks far away from  the functional approach that is limited to define  their roles, functions, and effects.
The study uses, in fact, the method of Participant observation that allowed us to understand the collective unconscious that governs these uses and what these diverse uses reflect in terms of social and cultural characteristics distinguishing the basic Tunisian personality.
The study indicates that it is important to rely on social networks sites to understand the nature and dynamics of human societies, showing that these networks present a virtual culture very similar to the culture of the society and do not contribute in the emergence of a counter-culture.