CDA/PDA of Digital Activism and Discursive Resistance to Disinformation: Ethical Tenor, Positioning, Counter-Framing, and Axiological Bonding

This article argues that disinformation in colonial contexts operates as epistemic and symbolic violence – an ideological camouflage and truth re-making that obscures power asymmetries, systemic inequality, and atrocities, distorts moral frameworks, and legitimises authoritarian or colonial power structures. While extensive research exists on the circulation of disinformation, little is known about the discursive pragmatic and evaluative strategies through which counter-voices resist such discourse. This article addresses this gap by examining how four pro-Palestinian Jewish organisations – Jewish Voice for Peace, Breaking the Silence, B’Tselem, and Jewish Council Australia – construct counter-narratives that challenge dominant ‘settler colonial’ framings of the Palestinian struggle while fostering trans-communal ‘communities of truth’ and pro-Palestinian moral bonds. Drawing on a purposive sample of web-based and Instagram texts (Feb 2024–June 2025), the study begins with a corpus-assisted macroscopic analysis to identify salient lexical patterns, followed by close textual analysis using a combined Critical and Positive Discourse Analysis (CDA/PDA) approach. A key focus is the discursive pragmatic functioning of evaluative language: how attitudinal meanings (e.g., “just,” “dehumanisation,” “love”), axiologically charged technical terms (e.g., “freedom,” “genocide,” “occupation,” “settler colonialism”) and iconised referents (e.g., “Israeli apartheid wall”) perform interpersonal, affiliative, and counter-framing work. Results show that these discourse resources operate as pragmatic tools for moral orientation, stance-taking, and identity realignment. Across the dataset, organisations act as ‘alternative Jewish movements,’ mobilising convergence and divergence bond clusters that reposition Jewish identity around justice, co-resistance, systemic compassion, and the grievability of all life. The findings demonstrate how evaluative patterns, combined with pragmatic analyses of bonding and positioning, reveal the discursive mechanisms through which digital activism enacts moral resistance and disrupts hegemonic state narratives.