A critical discursive psychology approach to understanding how disaster victims are delegitimized by hostile Twitter posts: Racism, victim-blaming, and forms of attack following the Grenfell Tower fire

Abstract

In this study, we aim to investigate how expressions of racism, victim-blaming, and attacks in different forms might function to delegitimize the support that victims might receive from the public. In order to understand how different forms of attacks in language happened to delegitimize the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire, we collected 416 hostile tweets from Twitter and used a critical discursive psychology approach to understand what was said, how it was said, and how it functioned. We found that attacking the victims was accomplished in two ways: (a) Twitter posts drew upon a conspiracy theory in which survivors and victims benefitted from the support of a supposed ‘liberal establishment’, and (b) Twitter posts delegitimized victims via ascribing them illegitimate identities. We also discuss the importance of counter-discourses that might be used to challenge these attacks and facilitate the representation of community empowerment when there is a disaster.