Rethink the concepts of online (counter)propaganda, (counter)discourse, (counter)ideology and activism in the perspective of a multimodal critical discourse analysis.

As part of my thesis project, which plans to analyse the discursive strategies mobilised online by civil society to counter Daesh’s cyber-propaganda, I face a conceptual problem that involves the articulation of four different but related concepts: (counter)discourse, (counter)propaganda, (counter)ideology and activism. One of my objectives is therefore to rethink these concepts from a perspective of studying discourse in the digital age. Nowadays, there is a renewed interest in these issues in the information and communication sciences and discourse studies (e.g. Benkler, Faris and Roberts, 2018; Fuchs, 2018; Oddo, 2018; Pedro-Carañana, 2018). Based on a multimodal critical discourse analysis (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001; Machin and Mayr, 2012; Machin and van Leeuwen, 2016; Mayr and Mayr, 2012), I will first question the concepts of propaganda and online discourse and the criteria’s used to qualify a practice as (counter)propaganda or (counter)discourse. Then, I will question the forms of ideology and activism that could be considered as forms of propaganda. Should a distinction be made between propaganda and forms of "civic rhetoric" or "democratic activism"? To what extent can critical discourse analysis be used to understand propaganda strategies and their impact on the ideologies of activists and/or citizens?