Who Benefits When Discourse Gets Democratised? Analysing a Twitter Corpus around the British Benefits Street Debate

In this chapter we examine discourses on the social media site Twitter around people who receive government support (commonly referred to as benefits), in the UK. Between 2008–2009 and 2011–2012, the UK experienced recession, and after coming to power in 2010 the Conservative-led coalition government embarked on a program of fiscal austerity that included cuts to some benefits. Baker (forthcoming) analysed the discourse around benefits in Britain’s most widely-read newspaper The Sun (a conservative tabloid), comparing the years 2002 and 2012. In 2012, the discourse around benefits was less sympathetic towards many types of benefit recipients, with the newspaper notably focusing on two constructions: benefits cheats and benefits culture, which respectively resulted in negative stories at the level of both the individual and the wider society. The newspaper painted a compelling picture of a benefits system created by the previous government that was both too soft and open to abuse and thus in need of reform.