Twitter is awash with trolls, spammers and misanthropes, all keen to ruin your day with a mean-spirited message or even a threat that can cause you genuine fear. It seems all too easy to set up an account and cause trouble anonymously, but an emerging field of research is making it easier to track perpetrators by looking at the way they use language when they chat.
All the technology in the world can't stop you from leaving a trail behind you when you broadcast your thoughts online or via text message. We all have individual writing styles and habits that build to create a linguistic identity.
Forensic linguistic experts can penetrate technological anonymity by interrogating the linguistic clues that you leave as you write. Everything from the way someone uses capitalisation or personal pronouns, to the words someone typically omits or includes, to a breakdown of average word or sentence length, can help identify the writer of even a short text like a Tweet or text message.
This is the second part of the article about political mass communication. It mostly deals with things like collocations, fill-ins, and framing. Collocations are words that are often used with others and so carry a particular connotations because of their association. For example, calling someone a rabid feminist vs. calling them a radical feminist would suggest more danger and wildness because of the use of the word rabid. Fill-ins refer to the use of deliberately obfuscating or vague language which encourages the listeners to respond by filling-in the gaps with their own preconceived notions or biases and can be a helpful persuasive tool. For example, saying something like, "they want to control you." The "they" here is vague and thus allows the listener to fill in with whatever they want. The article also touches on doublespeak and the use of euphemisms to refer to unpleasant topics (George W. Bush and enhanced interrogation anyone?). Framing, more broadly refers to the use of these tactics to get listeners to interpret the speech in certain ways favorable to the speaker.
