The Speech Act of Criticism Strategy Analysis on the Hashtag #Wadasmelawan

The study aims to describe the function of the hashtag #WadasMelawan and the criticism speech act strategy in voicing social justice for Wadas residents. Wadas is a village in the Central Java Province of Indonesia that is projected to be developed as an adhesive mining site—a government plan that the local Wadas villagers reject. The data in this study were collected on February 8 and 9, 2022, and processed using NVivo software. A total of 1550 tweets were analyzed using the hashtag function (Simpson, 2018) and the speech acts of criticism strategy (Nguyen, 2005). The results indicated that the #WadasMelawan has functions in expressing victimhood, solidarity, integration (victimhood and solidarity), and hashtag alone (expressing either solidarity or empathy). The speech acts of criticism strategy are negative evaluation, disapproval, disagreement, statement of difficulty, and consequences. In addition, indirect strategies are correction, indicating standards, preaching, demand for change, advice on change, uncertainty, asking, sarcasm, and the use of emojis or pictures. The #WadasMelawan and criticism strategy involved the media voicing justice for Wadas on X (formerly known as Twitter).