The impoliteness strategies in Tiktok comments on The Economist's video about Israel - Palestine conflicts

Abstract

Impoliteness has become a salient feature of online political interaction, particularly in highly polarized social media environments. Previous studies on digital impoliteness have largely focused on text-based platforms and have tended to prioritize strategy identification over pragmatic function. This study aimed at examining the types of impoliteness strategies employed by TikTok comment interactions and analysing how these strategies function to express and sustain disagreement in political discourse. Adopting a qualitative pragmatic approach, the study analyses 50 English comments selected from the comment section of a political news video posted by the official TikTok account @theeconomist concerning the Israel–Palestine conflict. The data were coded and interpreted using Culpeper’s (1996, 2011) impoliteness framework, focusing on bald-on-record impoliteness, positive impoliteness, negative impoliteness. Indeed, the most employed strategy, bald-on-record impoliteness, is followed by positive and negative impoliteness, with sarcasm serving as an indirect but effective form of disagreement. The strategies of impoliteness were used not only to call out opposing views, but also to assert ideological positions and delegitimize alternative perspectives. The findings of this study showed that impoliteness functions as a pragmatic resource for organizing disagreement in TikTok political interactions, offering insights into how impoliteness plays a highly polarized social media discourse.