In this article I analyze Twitter accounts of key political actors to show that the topoi and legitimation strategies these actors employ change over time and argue that this change is in reaction to specific (mediatized) events throughout 2015. I also argue that such discourses can be seen as recontextualizations of existing discourses that have been present in the UK public sphere for a number of years. Situated within the critical discourse paradigm, the analysis takes a multimodal, multigeneric approach that includes both tweets and hyperlinked texts to show how Twitter offers new possibilities of hyper(inter)textual legitimation strategies. © 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

critical discourse analysis Migration recontextualization Twitter legitimation Refugees mediatization

United Kingdom immigration policy refugee World Wide Web policy analysis social media