Construction of the collective image of groups in favor of the Colombian peace agreement on Twitter

Abstract

This article analyzes the construction of the collective ethos of groups in favor of the peace agreement on Twitter. With the progress of the negotiations and the possibility of the Agreement’s closure, several groups of citizen initiatives were formed to promote peace. Citizens found spaces for participation in social networks that they did not have before with the mass media, which is why they deployed a wide discursiveness in these platforms, particularly on Twitter. There, they deployed an image of themselves as a group in favor of peace and, at the same time, reworked their ethos in the face of attacks from those who opposed the Agreement. From the framework of Francophone discourse analysis and argumentation in discourse, we point out the construction of the “we” as a strategy to expand the collective and the use of some rhetorical-argumentative procedures to rework the ethos in the face of polemical situations and attacks by the political adversary. The study provides evidence of the strategies that allowed the construction of a collective that would later consolidate as the political choise for the Yes to peace in the 2016 plebiscite.