PETA’s Use of Impoliteness as a Means of Persuasion on Twitter
Introduction
This paper will explore how the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals foundation uses its Twitter as a means of persuasion to advocate for animal rights and appeal to their global audience, through constructing and sharing impolite tweets. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Foundation (PETA) describes themselves as a charity dedicated to establishing and protecting the rights of all animals. The organization has a history filled with boycotts, campaigns and rallies that focus on promoting animal rights and sometimes their form of aggressive activism is openly criticized. While PETA admits to using controversial tactics, they say it is because those tactics work. “Unlike our opposition—which is mostly composed of wealthy industries and corporations—PETA must rely largely on free “advertising” through media coverage. We will do extraordinary things to get the word out about animal cruelty because we have learned from experience that the media, sadly, do not consider the terrible facts about animal suffering alone interesting enough to cover” (2010). PETA uses a range of social media platforms to provide coverage of animal rights, including a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a Youtube channel, an Instagram handle, and a blog hosted on the foundation website. In this research, I will be examining tweets from PETA’s Twitter feed and performing a combination of analysis for impoliteness and multimodal analysis. I will be examining the current pinned tweet on PETA’s Twitter feed as of November 18, 2019, and the two tweets that they posted as on November 18, 2019.
Literature and Theory Review
Impoliteness can be described as a negative viewpoint towards particular behaviours occurring in particular circumstances. It is rude or the opposite of politeness. In Johnathan Culpeper’s 2005 as when a speaker intentionally commits a face-attacking act or the hearer perceives that behavior of the speaker to be face-attacking (Culpeper 2005). This study of PETA’s tweets will be using Culpeper’s impoliteness theories to analyze the tweets because PETA is a company known for their aggressive use of social media posts to persuade people to support animal rights.
Multimodal discourse analysis can be described as a linguistic approach that examines multiple modes of communication outside of and including text such as video, color, and images. This theoretical framework was chosen because Twitter tweets and many other forms of social media posts are considered multimodal text because they are often embedded with audio clips, images and videos. Ramona Kreis used multimodal analysis in her 2017 study on anti-refugee discourse on Twitter (Kreis 2017). The multimodal analysis in this paper will be based off of the analysis techniques used in her paper.
Screenshot of a tweet from PETA reading “Animals have the right to live a live free of suffering. RETWEET if you agree.”
Methodology
To gather data for this analysis, I visited PETA’s website to better understand why the organization chooses to use social media and the choices made behind its social media decisions. Under the “Media Centre” header on PETA’s website is the declaration that “One of PETA’s key strategies is to get coverage of animal rights in the media. Through eye-catching demonstrations, celebrity ads and original ideas, we reach readers of major national and local papers, viewers of TV and readers of blogs” (PETA UK 2019). PETA’s Twitter feed contains a small sample of the text, photos, videos and other content that PETA promotes across its platforms. I chose the one pinned tweet and the two most recent tweets of PETA’s Twitter feed posted on November 18, 2019, which was a day at the start of this study, because I am interested in how PETA chooses to express itself in the present, not how its social media approach has changed or stayed the same over a longer period of time.
As I wanted to look closely at the tweets and conduct a multimodal impolietness analysis and examine each tweet for linguistic and multimodal features, I was not able to collect large amounts of data, much like in Kreis’s multimodal analysis (Kreis 2017). In that study, she on how in tweets, “the paralinguistic features may be represented typographically, via letter repetition, capitalization, or emoticons/emojis” (Kreis 2017). In my analysis, I further expanded on the level of multimodal analysis by examining how the combination of texts, images and videos in the tweets works to persuade viewers to advocate for animal rights while fitting into impoliteness theory.
I looked at how PETA’s tweets can be impolite in the pursuit of persuading people to advocate for animal rights. In Penople Brown and Stephen Levinson’s book
Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, they described a face as an individual's or organization’s sense or reputation or “good name”. A face-attacking act an action that affects a person’s or organization’s face, in a negative manner (Brown & Levinson 1988). To analysis the tweets for impolietness, I looked at how the combined multimodal features of the tweets allowed PETA to commit face-attacking acts against groups or individuals that they believed to be animal abusers.
Screenshot of a tweet from PETA about camel abuse from fueled by tourism.
Analysis
Many of the tweets on PETA’s Twitter are multimodal and feature text that points out the abuse of some specific species of animal and a video that illustrates the abuse of that animal. For example, in the first tweet, the pinned tweet, is a combination of the text, video title, and video. The text from the tweet is “This kind of abuse is fueled by tourist camel rides. When he moves the halter at 0:14 you can see how much pain this camel must be in - it rubbed his nose raw! ” The video subtitle text that remains static on the tweet until the play button is pressed says, “What’s under the saddle of camel tourism rides?” The video itself actually depicts a camel that is being groomed by one man that has sores on his hump, a camel that is being beat by faceless men with sticks, then that same footage of the camel being beat by faceless men with sticks replayed next to a video of tourists happily riding camels. Subtitles overlay the video that says “This footage from Egypt Equine Aid, shows what’s beneath the saddles of camels used for tourist rides. Sores often go untreated and painful-looking scars. Unhealthy teeth. Severe mange. And obvious chronic malnourishment. Tourism drives the abuse of these intelligent and emotional animals. These conditions are common in the tourism industry. When you ride a camel, you’re supporting this abuse. Be a responsible tourist. Never participate in animal encounters when you travel. Take action at PETA.org/Camel”.
When combined, all of the multimodal features in the first tweet can be persuasive in dissuading people from riding camels, while also being impolite. In the quote, “This kind of abuse is fueled by tourist camel rides.” PETA firmly calls tourist abusers, which can be off-putting to anyone who is reading the tweet that is our has been a tourist because the accusation threatens their positive face. When the camel is being beaten by men carrying sticks that have blurred faces, PETA attacks the specific man who are beating the camel by showing them as abusers in this video, but they also attack the much wider group of the Egyptian tourism industry. The implication of not showing the faces of the men who beat the camels was that any man works in the animal tourism industry could be one of the men carrying the sticks. The last face-attacking act of the video is when the screen splits and some tourists riding camels are shown parallel to the men who are beating the camels with sticks. The overlapping subtitles state, “When you ride a camel, you’re supporting this abuse.” PETA works, once again, to send a face-attacking act towards tourists. The overall effect of the text and video is that animals deserve sympathy, while tourists and the tourism industry are abusers.
Sometimes PETA can make a post without committing a face-attacking act, however. In the second of PETA’s tweets, there is only text that says, “Animals have the right to live a life free of suffering. RETWEET if you agree.” While this tweet is relatively simple, it shows how PETA knows how to advocate for animal rights by posting text similar to their mission statement and encourage the responses of viewers through asking them to reshare. The simplicity of this tweet contrasts the impoliteness of some of their other tweets.
PETA doesn’t confine itself to only insulting specific groups in its tweets. The accusations of participating in animal abuse or suffering can be addressed to the general public. In the third tweet from PETA, there is text that points out the suffering of turkeys and an accompanying video with subtitles. The text reads, “No matter what labels are slapped on their carcasses before you roast and eat them - turkeys suffered for your meal. ” The video shows how turkey that are labeled as “humanely raised” are dragged and loaded onto trucks to be slaughtered for eating. There is also added context in that this tweet was posted a week before Thanksgiving, a holiday when many families across America buy and roast a turkey for their dinner tables. The intensity of PETA’s face-attacking acts are intensified in this post with the inclusion of the pronoun “you”. Whereas in the first post PETA was targeting tourists, which viewers could choose to identify themselves with, or not, this post directly targets the reader of the post. By writing, “turkeys suffered for your meal”, PETA places the responsibility of the suffering of turkey squarely on the reader of the post with the intention of damaging their positive face. In the video, PETA manages to simultaneously target both the industries that breed and raise turkeys and the consumers that buy those turkeys. The subtitles reference the “dumb, rich people in New York” who are willing to pay $300 for humanely raised turkeys. This impoliteness comes in the form of what Culpeper would refer to as positive politeness, because the insult damages the positive face wants of the New Yorkers who are willing to buy an expensive turkey (Culpeper 1996).
Conclusion
The organization PETA can often be impolite when using their Twitter feed to promote their mission of advocating for animal rights and the end of animal suffering everywhere. They can express their impolietness through face-attacking acts towards large industries like animal tourism and turkey raising, shifting the responsibility of animal suffering onto the general public, and directly insulting groups like rich New Yorkers. As demonstrated in the second tweet, however, PETA also knows how to use less impolite and aggressive posts to promote their animal rights mission. Why does PETA choose the social media aggressive and impolite social media tactics that it uses then? One possible explanation is that PETA is trying to build a level of guilt in people who are not animal rights activists through their social media posts. It might be their philosophy that if people feel guilty enough of the behaviors that PETA accuses them of (like perpetuating the suffering of turkeys), then people will convert into animal rights activists. Another explanation is that teams that create the posts for PETA’s Twitter feed and social media platforms feel more comfortable being impolite because the linguistic aggression is being performed behind the shield of a major organization. The anonymity provided by posting tweets online that are not connected to their real names may empower the authors of the individual tweets to express themselves more freely.
I am aware of the substantial limitations of my research. I chose to perform an in depth qualitative analysis of only three tweets that were accessible to view in PETA’s Twitter feed for a limited amount of time. If I were to extend my research into this subject, I would analyze more tweets. One interesting direction that would expand this research is examining what kinds of tweets that people tweet at PETA for traces of a similar level of impoliteness. I am also interested in the possibility of exploring the different responses that online viewers have to PETA’s intense social media strategy and Twitter feed. Getting to know more about how viewers respond and react to PETA’s tweets would give me insights into the overall success or failure of PETA’s social media strategy and what the wider implications could be for using impolietness as a tactic for persuasion.
References
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988.
Culpeper, Jonathan. “Towards an Anatomy of Impoliteness.” Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 25, no. 3, 1996, pp. 349–367., doi:10.1016/0378-2166(95)00014-3.
Culpeper, Jonathan. “Impoliteness and Entertainment in the Television Quiz Show: The Weakest Link.” Journal of Politeness Research. Language, Behaviour, Culture, vol. 1, no. 1, Jan. 2005, doi:10.1515/jplr.2005.1.1.35.
Kreis, Ramona. “#Refugeesnotwelcome: Anti-Refugee Discourse on Twitter.” Discourse & Communication, vol. 11, no. 5, Apr. 2017, pp. 498–514., doi:10.1177/1750481317714121.
“Media Centre.” PETA UK, PETA UK, www.peta.org.uk/media/.
Page, Ruth E., et al. Researching Language and Social Media: a Student Guide. Routledge, 2014.
“Why Does PETA Use Controversial Tactics?” PETA, PETA, 7 July 2010, www.peta.org/about-peta/faq/why-does-peta-use-controversial-tactics/.