Identity and impoliteness on two oppositional Facebook Pages

Community water fluoridation (CWF) is a public health intervention with a long history of intractable, bitter polarisation between its proponents and detractors, which continues today on social media. This presentation reports on Miriam's PhD research into how commenters on two Facebook Pages, one for and one against CWF, use evaluative language and impoliteness to construct identities as partisans in this conflict, struggling over scientific and moral authority and who does and does not belong in their partisan online spaces.