De metadato a recurso comunicativo: usos de los hashtags #HeForShe, #MeToo y #Mansplaining en X/Twitter

Abstract

This undergraduate thesis research focuses on the analysis of the strategic uses of three English-language hashtags —#HeForShe, #MeToo, and #Mansplaining— as communicative resources in feminist digital activism practices on the social network X/Twitter. Based on a corpus composed of 723 Spanish-language tweets, automatically collected via the X/Twitter API during March 2022, with special emphasis on March 8th, the study examines how these hashtags transcend their role as thematic labels to become pragmatic tools that enhance circulation, visibility, and the construction of communities and affiliative (Zappavigna, 2012) and disaffiliative (Bonnin, 2019) environments.

The research addresses the issue of understanding the role of hashtags not only as metadata tools but as communicative resources that users employ strategically to align stances, generate debate, and strengthen digital activism practices. It aims to identify the pragmatic functions of hashtags, their relationships with other internal and external elements of the tweet, and how they contribute to the creation of collective discourses and social mobilization in the digital sphere.

From a theoretical perspective that combines digital discourse analysis (Bou-Franch & Cornejos Blitvich, 2019; Cantamutto & Vela Delfa, 2016; Thurlow & Mrzoeck, 2011), interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz, 1982, 2001; Tannen, 1996), and the ethnography of communication (Gumperz & Hymes, 1972), language is conceived as a social and communicative construct, where speakers choose resources and strategies according to their interactional needs and visibility goals. Methodologically, the study combines quantitative and qualitative techniques, using digital tools to extract and organize the corpus, and applying manual pragmatic analyses to identify strategic uses and phenomena of social alignment in feminist digital activism.