‘HOW CAN ONE BE THIS WICKED TO HIS OWN BROTHER?’ : AN APPRAISAL COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF TIKTOK AND FACEBOOK PARTICIPANTS' COMMENTS ON A REAL-LIFE VIDEO NARRATIVE

This thesis is a comparative study of TikTok and Facebook comments on a real-life video narrative. It investigates the uniqueness of both platforms' participatory culture by comparing the similarities and differences in the patterns of commenters’ evaluative attitudes across both social media platforms. The study adopts a Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis (CADA) approach to study 4,647 TikTok comments and 3,220 Facebook comments, as well as the attitudinal subsystem of appraisal framework to a selected dataset of 100 comments, comprising the first 50 comments on the narrative post from each platform. While the corpus keyword analysis and close reading of concordance lines reveal similarities across both platforms in the languages used in the comments, key attitudinal lexis, attitudinal targets and recurrent themes and patterns of evaluative expressions across the entire comments corpus. The qualitative appraisal analysis exposes various structural patterns of both platforms commenters’ evaluative attitudes, and their identities as netizens through these evaluative patterns. Specifically, TikTok commenters emphasise negative Judgement, and their patterns of expression identify majority of them as digilantes of fame and emotional mobilisers. Facebook commenters, on the other hand, express more negative affect, presenting themselves as smart, critical, and highly opinionated digilantes of Blitvich(2022). These findings support previous research in cross-platform studies, demonstrating that despite the hybridity and fluidity in the affordances of social media platforms, notable differences persist especially in the nature of participants’ attitude expressions and general engagement with media contents. The study advances appraisal framework research in social media discourse, particularly in relation to TikTok comments as discourse and in cross-platform comparison of participants’ evaluative language across TikTok and Facebook platforms.

Grantor dc:publisher

Helsingin yliopisto

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• Ozor, Victoria Amuchechukwu

• TikTok, Facebook, video narrative comments, evaluative attitudes, appraisal framework, corpus-assisted discourse analysis, identities, digilantes of fame, smart mobs

Statement dc:rights

• CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10138/627018

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:helda.helsinki.fi:10138/627018