@Fesshole and the discourse of confession on X: A study of online sharing and community building

As a centuries-old discursive practice, confessional acts that are typically understood as an acceptance of one’s guilt or shame regarding a particular action or thought, have been observed and studied in various contexts including religion, law and crime, and medicine. However, the nature and practice of confessions have been increasingly reconfigured within newer, evolving digital media contexts. Social media platforms, such as X (formerly Twitter), have afforded users diverse ways to interact and engage in self-presentation online. The growing need to build and be part of communities, as well as reconceptualised notions of trust, intimacy and authenticity online, facilitated by mechanics of social media platforms and user anonymity have altered conventional notions of confession and absolution. This paper explores the reconfiguration of confessional acts by analysing a corpus of posts submitted to the X account @fesshole, which solicits confessions from its community of followers in a non-institutional, public online context. We analyse the posts by borrowing from van Dijk’s (2015) socio-cognitive model for analysis of discourse, which focuses on the micro and macro levels on which cognition mediates in terms of socially shared norms and ideologies within and across discursive communities. The results of the analysis suggest that X users establish rapport through confessions of an intra- and interpersonal nature about topics of varying degrees of seriousness and in ways that give the ambient online audience something to relate to and connect with. In doing so, confessors seek to bond in place of absolution, and they offer inspiration or commonality in place of guilt.