The hashtag campaign around #CoronaEltern and #CoronaElternRechnenAb: Positioning practices on Twitter during the pandemic

Abstract

As kindergartens and schools closed down during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, two hashtags emerged on Twitter: #CoronaEltern (#CoronaParents) and #CoronaEltern­Rech­nenAb (#CoronaParentsDocumentTheCosts). In this paper, we examine the positioning practices around both hashtags as expres­sions of “digital activism” (Joyce 2010: VIII). One characteristic of the hashtag campaign is that political demands are hardly ever made di­rectly. Rather, the participants resort to five main linguistic patterns: (1) they address different target groups; (2) they refer to different protagonists; (3) in the subcorpus #CoronaEltern specifically, they constitute themselves as a collective through (4) the recurring use of first-person narratives; (5) and generalization and typification. Our findings show that #CoronaParents are not just parents in times of a pandemic: #CoronaParents are only those who see themselves as such, participating in an evolving, at times misunderstood commu­nity.