Abstract

In this contribution, we analyse speech acts of contradiction or opposition in the contemporary media democracy in order to discuss which kinds of utterances can for which reasons be considered adequate from a perspective of language critique in the context on hand. As a starting point, we take the argument brought forward by Habermas, Pörksen and others that social media has fundamentally changed democratic societies because they enable anyone to assume the role of sender or author, and that this circumstance has contributed to an erosion of the difference between the public and the private sector. In an in-depth empirical analysis based on contradiction studies and language critique, we discuss utterances made by “Jana from Kassel”, a COVID-19 anti-lockdown protester who in 2020 compared herself to resistance fighter Sophie Scholl, and by two politicians who reacted to her utterance on Twitter, taking them as our examples. Combining the well-established concept of functional adequacy (funktionale Angemessenheit) with ethical adequacy (ethische Angemessenheit), based on the idea of the responsibility of the speaker, we show that Jana from Kassel’s as well as one of the politicians’ utterances can partly be categorized as deviating from what can be considered adequate. Our research thus contributes to an understanding of social media as a public space in which speakers need to take responsibility for their linguistic actions as an important aspect of successfully assuming the sender or author role.