Censorship, Linguistic Innovation and Identity Construction in Selected Social Media Discourses: A Critical Discourse Analysis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18592/let.v16i1.20086Keywords:
cencorship, linguistic innovation, identity construction, social media discourse, digital communication, online resistanceAbstract
Social media censorship has intensified globally, compelling users to devise sophisticated linguistic strategies to preserve expressive agency in increasingly regulated digital spaces. This study examines the dialectical relationship between censorship, linguistic innovation, and identity construction across selected social media platforms, interrogating how content moderation functions as a catalyst for alternative communicative practices. Drawing on Foucault's discourse-power framework and Bucholtz and Hall's sociocultural linguistic model of identity, the study qualitatively analysed approximately 400 purposively sampled posts from Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, and Reddit (2020–2024). Thirty instances were subjected to critical discourse analysis across three contexts: Hong Kong protest discourse, LGBTQ+ content moderation, and COVID-19 health communication. Users systematically deploy phonetic modification, symbolic substitution, semantic obfuscation, and hashtag innovation not only to evade algorithmic detection but as identity markers signalling group affiliation, ideological positioning, and resistance. Censorship-induced creativity fosters distinct digital subcultures that reconfigure online communicative norms. This research advances understanding of digital censorship's influence on language evolution and identity performance, urging nuanced content regulation policies that balance platform safety with linguistic diversity and expressive freedom.
References
Androutsopoulos, J. (2006). Multilingualism, diaspora, and the Internet: Codes and identities on German-based diaspora websites. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 10(4), 520-547.
Baron, N. S. (2008). Always on: Language in an online and mobile world. Oxford University Press.
Baym, N. K. (2015). Personal connections in the digital age (2nd ed.). Polity Press.
Bell, A. (1984). Language style as audience design. Language in Society, 13(2), 145-204.
Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim code. Polity Press.
Bernstein, B. (1971). Class, codes and control: Vol. 1. Theoretical studies towards a sociology of language. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Bonilla, Y., & Rosa, J. (2015). #Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States. American Ethnologist, 42(1), 4-17.
Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power (G. Raymond & M. Adamson, Trans.; J. B. Thompson, Ed.). Harvard University Press.
Bou-Franch, P., & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2014a). Conflict management in massive polylogues: A case study from YouTube. Journal of Pragmatics, 73, 19–36. Academia.edu
___________________________________. (2014b). Gender ideology and social identity processes in online language aggression against women. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 2(2), 226–248. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.2.2.03bou
boyd, d. (2014). It’s complicated: The social lives of networked teens. Yale University Press.
boyd, d., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210-230.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge
Bucher, T. (2018). If…then: Algorithmic power and politics. Oxford University Press.
Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4-5), 585-614.
Cover, R. (2016). Digital identities: Creating and communicating the online self. Academic Press.
Crystal, D. (2011). Internet linguistics: A student guide. Routledge.
Daniels, J. (2020). The algorithmic rise of the “alt-right.†Social Media + Society, 6(2), 1-12.
de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life (S. Rendall, Trans.). University of California Press.
Deibert, R., Palfrey, J., Rohozinski, R., & Zittrain, J. (Eds.). (2008). Access denied: The practice and policy of global Internet filtering. MIT Press.
Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Routledge.
Fakhira, R., & Sartini, N. W. (2024). Cross-cultural pragmatic study of complaint strategies in Banjarese and Javanese. LET: Linguistics, Literature and English Teaching Journal, 14(2), 270–290. https://jurnal.uin-antasari.ac.id/index.php/let/article/view/13764
Flew, T. (2021). Regulating platforms. Polity Press.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977. Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1984). The history of sexuality, Volume 1: The will to knowledge. Penguin.
franzke, a. s., Bechmann, A., Zimmer, M., Ess, C., & the Association of Internet Researchers. (2020). Internet research: Ethical guidelines 3.0. https://aoir.org/reports/ethics3.pdf
Gee, J. P. (2014). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method (4th ed.). Routledge.
Gerrard, Y. (2018). Beyond the hashtag: Circumventing content moderation on social media. New Media & Society, 20(12), 4492-4511.
Giles, H. (1973). Accent mobility: A model and some data. Anthropological Linguistics, 15(2), 87-105.
Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. Yale University Press.
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday Anchor Books.
Gumperz, J. J. (1982). Discourse strategies. Cambridge University Press.
Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communicative action, Vol. 1: Reason and the rationalization of society (T. McCarthy, Trans.). Beacon Press.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning. Edward Arnold.
Herring, S. C. (2007). A faceted classification scheme for computer-mediated discourse. Language@Internet, 4(1). https://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2007/761
Jones, R. H., Chik, A., & Hafner, C. A. (Eds.). (2015). Discourse and digital practices: Doing discourse analysis in the digital age. Routledge.
King, G., Pan, J., & Roberts, M. E. (2013). How censorship in China allows government criticism but silences collective expression. American Political Science Review, 107(2), 326–343.
Labov, W. (1994). Principles of linguistic change: Vol. 1. Internal factors. Blackwell.
Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. University of Pennsylvania Press.
MacKinnon, R. (2012). Consent of the networked: The worldwide struggle for Internet freedom. Basic Books.
Marwick, A., & boyd, d. (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13(1), 114-133.
Marwick, A., & boyd, d. (2018). Understanding privacy at the margins. International Journal of Communication, 12, 1157-1165.
McCulloch, G. (2019). Because Internet: Understanding the new rules of language. Riverhead Books.
Mohamed, S., Png, M.-T., & Isaac, W. (2020). Decolonial AI: Decolonial theory as sociotechnical foresight in artificial intelligence. Philosophy & Technology, 33(4), 659–684. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00405-8
Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. NYU Press.
Roberts, S. T. (2019). Behind the screen: Content moderation in the shadows of social media. Yale University Press.
Roberts, M. E. (2018). Censored: Distraction and diversion inside China's Great Firewall. Princeton University Press.
Seargeant, P., & Tagg, C. (Eds.). (2014). The language of social media: Identity and community on the Internet. Palgrave Macmillan.
Silverstein, M. (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication, 23(3–4), 193–229. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0271-5309(03)00013-2
Suzor, N. (2019). Lawless: The secret rules that govern our digital lives. Cambridge University Press.
Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33–47). Brooks/Cole.
Thurlow, C., & Mroczek, K. (Eds.). (2011). Digital discourse: Language in the new media. Oxford University Press.
Tufekci, Z. (2017). Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest. Yale University Press.
Turkle, S. (2015). Reclaiming conversation: The power of talk in a digital age. Penguin Press.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511803932
Wiegand, M., Ruppenhofer, J., & Kleinbauer, T. (2019). Detection of abusive language: The problem of biased datasets. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Vol. 1, pp. 602–608). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Yus, F. (2023). Pragmatics and the Internet. In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (Pragmatics), C.A.Chapelle, N.Taguchi & D.Kadar (Eds.). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0309.pub2.
Zhou, J., Zhu, Y., & Jiang, M. (2021). Online resistance: The language games of censorship evasion in China. New Media & Society, 23(7), 1768–1785.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs.
Zuckerman, E. (2010). Rewire: Digital cosmopolitans in the age of connection. W. W. Norton & Company.
Zuckerman, E. (2019). The case for digital public infrastructure. Knight First Amendment Institute.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Azetu Azashi Agyo

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.
LET (LINGUISTICS, LITERATURE, AND LANGUAGE TEACHING) http://jurnal.uin-antasari.ac.id/index.php/let/index licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.




