Nonsensical Tweets as Participatory Propaganda: Negotiating Identity through Naming and Stance-taking

This paper argues that seemingly nonsensical antagonistic tweets about lynching in India constitute a key modality of online violence and participatory propaganda in the contemporary digital space of assembly in the Global South. Focusing on X (formerly Twitter) as a digital assembly site, I conceptualize non-sensical tweets — those that systematically violate Paul Grice’s maxims of quantity, quality, relation, and manner — as a form of social aggression that co-produces political identities while sabotaging deliberation. Drawing on Norman Fairclough’s political discourse analysis and Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall’s sociocultural linguistic approach to identity, the paper treats political discourse as both elite–public and public–public interaction around contentious issues such as cow-related lynchings and pro-Hindutva politics in India. Empirically, the paper examines a dataset of 285 tweets collected via Netlytic that used the keywords “lynching” and “India,” situating them within the rise of Hindutva and increasingly stringent cow-protection laws since the mid 2010s. It analyzes how users exploit platform affordances — hashtags, mentions, URLs, emojis, GIFs, and threaded replies — to misname others (e.g., “traitor,” “liberal media,” “godi media,” “Muslim appeaser”) and take polarizing stances that index in group solidarity while stripping opponents of agency. Building on Karen Pennesi’s work on naming and Laura Ahearn’s notion of agency, misnaming is theorized as an act of online violence that imposes identities on targets and imposes a hierarchy of who can speak credibly in the digital arena. The paper identifies five recurrent patterns — tweets without referential meaning, reliance on non-lexical features, strings of keywords, linguistic innovations, and the convergence of spoken and written forms — that collectively produce “noise” while still carrying strong stance cues for an initiated audience. These tweets do not merely derail conversations; they function as participatory propaganda by embedding communal narratives about lynching, fake news, minority rights, and Hindutva into everyday interaction, turning digital participation itself into a vehicle for authoritarian majoritarian common sense. Platform affordances, including the ease of deletion and the opacity of broken threads, further privilege writers over readers, making context selectively visible and heightening asymmetries of identification and accountability. In response to the workshop’s question about countering participatory propaganda, the paper argues that interventions must address both linguistic practice and infrastructural design. First, moderation and counter-speech strategies that rely solely on explicit hate terms will miss the subtle work of misnaming, stance-taking, and technocultural in jokes that organize communities around antagonism. Second, successful responses are more likely under conditions where: (a) platforms limit the scalability of spam-like tagging and disembodied links; (b) civil society actors cultivate alternative naming practices and stance repertoires that reassert the agency of targeted groups; and (c) researchers and regulators treat “nonsense” not as discardable noise but as a central discourse technology of digital authoritarianism. By foregrounding non-sensical tweets as a modality of participatory propaganda in India, the paper contributes to broader debates on how digital authoritarianism in the Global South is enacted through everyday linguistic practices that weaponize platform affordances against democratic deliberation.