Seminar | Metapragmatics of 'influencing' and influencer flip on the microblogging platform BlueSky

This talk reports on a study investigating the evolving discourses surrounding the term “influencer” within the context of migration from Twitter to BlueSky, using Davies and Harre's (1990) positioning analysis and the methodological toolkit of corpus-assisted discourse analysis. I will first introduce the discourse keyword "influencer" and survey its contexts of use on early social media. I will then introduce the relatively new addition to the frontrunners of social media landscape, the microblogging platform BlueSky, which will serve as the data source for the present study. Using a 1,5 mio words corpus of BlueSky posts, I examine how this term is used and perceived during three waves of user migration from Twitter/X, characterised by their respective sociocultural and platform-specific dynamics (October 2022, Musk’s purchase of Twitter; February 2024, invite no longer needed; November 2024, the US election). I analyse three complementary analytical frames: the collocational profiles of modifier constructions ([adjective/noun] + influencer), keyword distributions across waves, and storyline content of the influencer + be grammatical frame. I interpret the findings through Positioning Theory, arguing that the data provide corpus-linguistic evidence for the influencer flip: the discursive reversal of the category influencer from a broadly aspirational, commercial identity to a politically coded and institutionally threatening one within this community.