Buzzeringuistics: Decoding Digital Propaganda through Cyberpragmatics
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18326/jopr.v8i2.696-717Keywords:
buzzeringuistics, cyberpragmatics, pragmatics, speech acts, buzzerAbstract
This study examines how political buzzer discourse on social media constructs persuasion through the interaction of speech acts, cyberpragmatic functions, and digital politeness strategies. Focusing on competing hashtag discourses IndonesiaEmas and IndonesiaCemas on X, the study adopts a descriptive qualitative approach to explore how meaning, intention, and ideological positioning are pragmatically negotiated in online political communication. The data consist of selected user-generated comments representing polarized political engagement and were analyzed using speech act theory and cyberpragmatics. The findings indicate that assertive speech acts dominate buzzer discourse by presenting evaluative judgments and ideological claims as established realities, reinforced by expressive and directive acts that mobilize emotions and encourage audience alignment. The persuasive force of these utterances is strengthened through five cyberpragmatic functions, namely contextual saturation, non-verbal compensation, cyber-aggression, high inferential load, and algorithmic relevance optimization, reflecting how digital affordances shape interpretation and intensify pragmatic effects. The study also identifies three strategic patterns in digital politeness management, namely legitimization, delegitimization, and mitigation, which construct in-group solidarity and regulate face-threatening acts in polarized discourse. The findings show that buzzer communication operates as a systematic form of performative political discourse. The study proposes Buzzeringuistics as an integrative analytical framework that combines cyberpragmatics, speech act analysis, and critical perspectives to explain digitally mediated political persuasion.
References
REFERENCES
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Creswell, J. W. (2014). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Djatmika. (2016). Kesantunan berbahasa dalam wacana publik. Surakarta, Indonesia: UNS Press.
Dynel, M. (2015). The landscape of impoliteness research. Journal of Politeness Research, 11(2), 329–354. https://doi.org/10.1515/pr-2015-0013
Gitu, S., Basweti, N., & Atoh, F. (2025). Understanding impolite utterances on Facebook in Kenya: A cyberpragmatic approach. Hungarian Journal of African Studies (Afrika Tanulmányok), 19(1), 23–41.
Graham, T. (2015). Everyday political talk in the internet-based public sphere. In S. Coleman & D. Freelon (Eds.), Handbook of digital politics (pp. 247–263). Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
Herring, S. C. (2013). Discourse in Web 2.0: Familiar, reconfigured, and emergent. In D. Tannen & A. M. Trester (Eds.), Discourse 2.0: Language and new media (pp. 1–25). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Locher, M. A. (2013). Review of Cyberpragmatics: Internet-mediated communication in context (F. Yus). Journal of Pragmatics, 47(1), 128–130.
Masduki (2021). Media Control in the Digital Politics of Indonesia. Media and Communication, 9(4), 52–61.
Olshtain, E. (2023). Cyberpragmatics: Complaints and the collective perspective. Retrieved from ScienceDirect.
Orsini-Jones, M., & Lee, F. (2018). Cyberpragmatics. In M. Orsini-Jones & F. Lee (Eds.), Intercultural communicative competence for global citizenship (pp. 25–37). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Searle, J. R. (1976). A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society, 5(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500006837
Spradley, J. P. (1980). Participant observation. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Sumarlam, S., Djatmika, D., Widiana, Y., & Budiyono, S. (2024). Persuasive speech act strategies of online fashion sellers in live e-commerce: A cyberpragmatics approach. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 14(11), 3385–3393. https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1411.07
Sumartono, S., Ariyati, Y., Puryanto, P., & Setiawan, Y. L. (2023). Netizens Become Political Buzzers as an Act of Retribution. Migration Letters, 21(21), 745–755.
Woolley, S. C., & Howard, P. N. (2016). Political communication, computational propaganda, and autonomous agents. International Journal of Communication, 10, 4882–4890.
Yus, F. (2011). Cyberpragmatics: Internet-mediated communication in context. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.
Zappavigna, M. (2018). Searchable talk: Hashtags and social media metadiscourse. London, UK: Bloomsbury.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Arkin Haris

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
License and Copyright Agreement
In submitting the manuscript to the journal, the authors certify that:
- They are authorized by their co-authors to enter into these arrangements.
- The work described has not been formally published before, except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture, review, thesis, or overlay journal.
- That it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere,
- That its publication has been approved by all the author(s) and by the responsible authorities – tacitly or explicitly – of the institutes where the work has been carried out.
- They secure the right to reproduce any material that has already been published or copyrighted elsewhere.
- They agree to the following license and copyright agreement.
Copyright
Authors who publish with JOURNAL OF PRAGMATICS RESEARCH agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-SA 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.
