#Vaccine_for_Lebanese_first debate on Twitter and argumentation strategies: a pragma-dialectical approach

At the end of January 2021, a Twitter thread began with the hashtag “#Vaccine_for_Lebanese_first, advocating the privileged access to the vaccine for Lebanese nationals. The context of Lebanon’s political and economic crisis as well as the Syrian and Palestinian refugees issue were the background to a debate which triggered heated reactions among both the Lebanese and other Arab nationals, especially Saudi. The topics dealt with were beyond a simple opinion polarization, touching issues ranging from national identity to regional politics. The complexity of the debate provided for an interesting case to be examined through argumentation analysis. The present paper looks into the argumentative strategies employed by the means of pragma-dialectical approach, especially concerning strategic manoeuvering, in order to reconstruct the argumentation schemes employed, explicate implicit standpoints and assumptions, and finally interpret them in the context of Twitter’s mediated communication by the means of qualitative analysis. The findings show that the specificities of the channel (Twitter) and the political implications and understanding of the hashtag resulted in a reduplication of assumed starting points at topical choice level, a high degree of variation at presentational device level, and the construction of multiple simultaneous ingroups and identities.