In order to be able to answer the above questions, the chapter adopts Machin and Mayr’s (2012) CDA approach which allows one to assess the extent to which Twitter is helping in progressive cultural shifts, assisting citizens gain the necessary consciousness they need in order to realize their place in the world. This can be made concrete by looking at the way people are represented as they speak through quoting verbs; how people’s identities are created on Twitter; how action is represented; it also involves checking if anything is concealed or taken for granted as well as how rhetoric and metaphors are used. These discursive strategies have ideological implications on how people gain their consciousness or their relations to those in power. For example, the way action is represented, let us say in cases of abduction, may hide the perpetrator and foreground the victim. The study argues that if Twitter is to background perpetrators of human rights abuses, then it has got no potential, but if it allows foregrounding them, then it helps citizens to connect problems and causes.
These tools from Machin and Mayr (2012) were applied on 1,500 original tweets fltered from 35,759 #ZimbabweanLivesMatter hashtags shared between 22 and 28 October 2020. This moment was selected as it re-ignited the #Zimbabwe anLivesMatter hashtag as people responded to the Zimbabwean government’s call upon them to attend an anti-sanctions gala that was slated for 25 October 2020. The tweets were gathered using NVivo capture and textually coded through NVivo 12 where particular themes were identifed through a deeper open coding dive into the corpus. Focus was also put on how those themes were tackled especially in reference to representational strategies. Thus, two methodological strategies were applied here. Themes from the texts were identifed through open coding while strategies were identifed through a deductive strategy. That is, they were selected from Machin and Mayr’s (2012) discussive strategies prior to data analysis. The following section explores the nature of the #ZimbabweanLivesMatter hashtag, starting with emergent themes before delving into discursive strategies that char acterize the discourse.