Analyzing the Role of Hashtags and Trends as Digital Rhetoric in Pakistani Political Discourse on Twitter: A Study of Top Trends

Abstract

Twitter has become a sensation in the political discourse in recent times. It has become a source of controversies regarding misinformation, polarization, and molding public opinion. These controversies usually arise during elections in different countries, including the U.S., Australia, Brazil, and Russia. An episode of a similar nature was detected in Pakistani politics as well when the sitting prime minister, Imran Khan, was ousted by a no-confidence vote in April 2022. Following this development, a trend (Imported Government, unacceptable) broke all records. It lasted over ten days as the top Twitter trend and was used in millions of tweets from Pakistanis worldwide. A similar hashtag (Desecration of Masjid-e-Nabavi, Unacceptable) received plenty of attention as well. These hashtags and trends proved vital in swaying public opinion and portrayed qualities of a genre with a communicative purpose, participants, context, limitations, and rhetorical structure. This paper analyses hashtags and trends as a genre using steps and design published in Amy Devitt, Mary Jo Reiff, and Anis Bawarshi's textbook, Scenes of Writing: Strategies for Composing with Genres (2004). The data used for this qualitative Study is taken in tweets with the concerned hashtags using purposive sampling.