The Construction Of National Identity On Social Media

On April 14,2018,the United States,Britain and France jointly launched an air strike against Syria.The debate about the truth of the video of "Douma chemical attack" immediately escalated into a fierce competition to win international public opinion.In this fierce public opinion war,the United States not only continues to take advantage of its traditional media discourse,but also positively adopts pragmatic strategies on social media to build an ideal national identity.There are many researches on the construction of national identity,but only a few of them focused on social media.Among the researches on social media and the construction of national identity,most of them focus on how individuals or non-governmental organizations construct national identity on social media.There are few researches focused on the government.Thus,after the literature review of relationship between national identity and media discourse,the tweets from the US government about 2018 Syria air strike from April 7th to April 28 th will be taken as examples to study the national identity constructed by the US on social media and the pragmatic strategies adopted in these tweets.The analysis method of pragmatics will be combined with the study on social media discourse.After this study,the national identity of the US on social media is mainly constructed as the defender of humanitarian and peace,and the supervisor of international law.In order to construct national identity,the pragmatic strategies adopted by the United States mainly include selective use of commendatory and derogatory terms,impolite strategies,skillful use of third parties,empathy strategies,selection of favorable topics,pragmatic vagueness.In this study,social identity theory and pragmatic strategy research methods are combined,hoping to complement the existing research on social media through the research on the national identity constructed by the US on social media.I hope this paper can also provide some enlightenment for China about the language communication strategies that they can adopt in the international community.