An Analysis of X/Twitter Posts Regarding Amendments to the Animal Protection Law through the Lens of Peirce's Semiotic
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https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14506409Keywords:
Semiotics, Semantics, Pragmatics, Media AnalysisAbstract
The Animal Protection Law No. 5199, also known as the Animal Rights Law or Street Animals Law, has been in effect since 2004, undergoing various additions, removals, and amendments over the years. While the law has been subject to both positive and negative criticisms from time to time, a particularly intense public reaction emerged in the second half of 2024 regarding the planned amendments to the law. Concerns about the law's provisions for the collection of stray animals into shelters and their euthanasia under certain conditions have led to negative criticisms, while recent news of attacks and diseases involving street animals have generated positive feedback. These discussions have dominated social media for an extended period. This study focuses on how language, as a means of communication, and its associated signs, particularly in social media, represent specific perspectives, opinions, trends, and orientations through visual media. While users of publications lacking visual data, such in newspapers, magazines, or articles, tend to focus on the text, recipients on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and X/Twitter, where society frequently consumes advertisements, information, news, or comments, pay more attention to visual content (Chandler and Sweller, 1991; Cross, 2011; Cheng Chu Chan, 2022; Koutromanou, Sotirakou, and Mourlas 2023; Sunsaro, 2023). Therefore, the images selected or preferred by the text producer or publisher serve as both an introduction to the text, a window into it, and provide clues about the intended approach of the texts. This study focuses on a dataset of news and informational texts shared on X/Twitter along with visuals related to the Animal Protection Law and conducts a semiotic analysis of these visuals. Based on the assumption that a language recipient who has not read the text can form an initial opinion about it by simply looking at the visual, the distribution and content of visual usage in texts containing positive or negative criticisms are evaluated.
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