Male, Female, and Nonbinary Differences in UK Twitter Self-descriptions: A Fine-grained Systematic Exploration

Purpose: Although gender identities influence how people present themselves on social media, previous studies have tested pre-specified dimensions of difference, potentially overlooking other differences and ignoring nonbinary users.Design/methodology/approach: Word association thematic analysis was used to systematically check for fine-grained statistically significant gender differences in Twitter profile descriptions between 409,487 UK-based female, male, and nonbinary users in 2020. A series of statistical tests systematically identified 1,474 differences at the individual word level, and a follow up thematic analysis grouped these words into themes.Findings: The results reflect offline variations in interests and in jobs. They also show differences in personal disclosures, as reflected by words, with females mentioning qualifications, relationships, pets, and illnesses much more, nonbinaries discussing sexuality more, and males declaring political and sports affiliations more. Other themes were internally imbalanced, including personal appearance(e.g. male: beardy;female: redhead), selfevaluations(e.g. male: legend;nonbinary: witch;female: feisty), and gender identity(e.g. male: dude;nonbinary: enby;female: queen).Research limitations: The methods are affected by linguistic styles and probably underreport nonbinary differences.Practical implications: The gender differences found may inform gender theory, and aid social web communicators and marketers.Originality/value: The results show a much wider range of gender expression differences than previously acknowledged for any social media site.

Memes as Ideological Representations in the 2019 Nigerian Presidential Campaigns: A Multimodal Approach

This paper explicates the linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of ideological representation in selected Nigerian political campaign advertisement memes on Instagram. Four memes pertaining to each of Muhammadu Buhari and Atiku Abubakar’s presidential campaigns on Instagram were selected and analysed using a combination of Kress and van Leeuwen’s(2006) Social Semiotics and van Dijk’s(1998) Critical Discourse Analysis. Key ideological stances of positive self-presentation and negative otherpresentation were discovered in the memes and the aspirants largely deployed both stances. However, while aspirant Muhammadu Buhari maintained the positive selfpresentation strategy for continuity of government, aspirant Atiku Abubakar concentrated more on the negative other-presentation in order to undermine the incumbent candidate/party. All these were achieved with the reinforcement of social semiotic resources such as the meta-functions: facial and body gestures/expressions, and bright colours.