Journal of Language and Literature Inquiry
Vol. 1 No. 2 (2026): November 2026

“Because of a debt dispute”: Defamation on social media

Rahmawati Rahmawati (Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Universitas Gadjah Mada)
Sailal Arimi (Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Universitas Gadjah Mada)



Article Info

Publish Date
18 Sep 2026

Abstract

Debt cases create bigger problems that can even lead to criminal cases. Forensic linguistics has a very big role to reveal facts in a bright light with a scientific approach. This study aims to describe and uncover cases of language crimes due to debts that lead to defamation and violations of the ITE law with a pragmatic theoretical approach. The research data were collected using a documentation technique. The data of this research are written data of legal cases that already have inkrah status. The data are sourced from the website of the Directory of Decisions of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Indonesia. The results of this study prove that the lingual forms used by the defendant contain negative meanings, such as dog and cheater. Judging from the context of the speech, the defendant's speech took place on social media, which has the potential to grab the attention of many people so that the defendant's speech can have a perlocutionary effect on the victim. However, based on the analysis of presumption, presupposition, precondition, and entailment, the defendant's speech is the output of a series of events and conditions that have harmed her. This means that the defendant and the victim are two parties who are harmed by each other. Thus, the verdict issued must also consider the context of the events behind the presence of the legal case speech as a whole so that the verdict is fair to both parties.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

JLLI

Publisher

Subject

Description

Journal of Language and Literature Inquiry (JLLI) is an international peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes high-quality research across diverse fields of language and literary studies, including linguistics, applied linguistics, language education, literature, literary criticism, ...