The impoliteness metadiscourse about a public apology

Abstract Public apologies seek moral reconciliation with the victim and the broader audience. When published online, they also become the focus of impoliteness metadiscourse, particularly on Twitter/X. Drawing on the pragmatic approaches to apologies as moral acts and on impoliteness theory, we aim to analyze how users reacted to a public apology, issued by Formula One driver Nelson Piquet after he deployed the term “neguinho/nigger” to refer to Lewis Hamilton. Given the controversy about the term, we examined if users classified it as a racist slur or as a neutral form of address, as Piquet framed it. Our data comes from 469 tweets, published as replies to the apology. The findings show that 84.5% of the users classified the term as a racist insult and judged the apology as insincere. Processes of online public shaming were also identified in the posts, aiming at exposing Piquet for his misconduct.