A Forensic Linguistic Analysis of Authorship Identification of Selected Anonymous Comments on ‘Gaza Attack’ in Threads Social Media Application
Lect. Asma Asaad Thamer · Journal of Education College Wasit University · 2025
The anonymous comments have become an integral part of the online world as a double -edged sword to either protect identity for avoiding harassment or engage in harmful behaviors without taking responsibility of the consequences. Since social media platforms allow posting of anonymous comments, the present paper deploys forensic authorship identification analysis to evaluate anonymous comments based on authorship identification and authorship characterization. The research generates its data from fifteen anonymous comments in Threads social media platform and qualitatively analyzed using available techniques of the forensic linguistics that include stylistics, sociolinguistics and dialectology to unveil the possible user's profile identity of the Threads users with anonymous identity. The findings of the study show that language always provides a valuable contextual footprint to uncover not only speaker's/writer's intentional and implicational meaning but unveiling those behind the production of the discourse. It also reveals that, in authorship identification methodologies, various forms of lexical choice and semiotic linguistic choice are significant factors for not only identifying but differentiating between a large set of anonymous authors in social media narratives which would be an important future endeavor. keywords: forensic linguistics, anonymous comments, authorship identification, authorship characterization