Attacking epistemic personhood on Twitter/X

Abstract

This paper reports on an examination of the actions that Spanish epistemic agents perform in order to question, challenge, undermine and/or destroy the epistemic personhood of an informer on Twitter, recently been renamed ‘X’. Relying on a corpus of reactions to information about sanitary measures released during the COVID-19 pandemic by an allegedly reliable and trustworthy information source, namely the Spanish Ministry of Health, the analysis looks into the said actions and how these are arranged in larger digital discourse sequences. While contributing to extant research on conflict talk in Spanish on social networks, the paper also aims to raise vulnerable epistemic agents’ awareness of the varied forms and dynamics of threats to epistemic personhood as a way of empowering them to identify and counteract such threats.