Kitsiou, RoulaDuring the COVID-19 pandemic, early public health messages about masking led to public confusion due to conflicting statements, rendering masks a controversial sociopolitical issue. This study employs computer-mediated discourse analysis and tools developed by the discourse-historical approach to explore discourse topics and (anti-/pro-)masking rhetoric patterns in the content of (a) a Greek news video posted on a news site on Facebook, and (b) a corpus of 44 online Facebook comments posted in response to (a). The findings of the study point out that, in the context of the post-truth era, conflicting messages on public health have resulted in politicization of masking and to polarization over socially un-/acceptable behavior. Face covering thus constitutes a sociospatial practice in the process of becoming a form of politic behavior, which is contested among members of Greek society.application/pdfhttps://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/awpel/article/view/30653engΕΕΠΓ / LESoLhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0Aegean Working Papers in Ethnographic Linguistics2585-2108Aegean Working Papers in Ethnographic Linguistics; Τόμ. 3 (2021): Ειδικό τεύχος: Γλώσσα, πανδημία, γλωσσολογία; 273-291Aegean Working Papers in Ethnographic Linguistics; Vol. 3 (2021): Ειδικό τεύχος: Γλώσσα, πανδημία, γλωσσολογία; 273-291Face covering as a social practice: The rhetoric of anti-/masking during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Greek digital public sphereinfo:eu-repo/semantics/articleinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion2022-06-29Δημοσίευση σε περιοδικόPublication in journalΓλώσσα και ΓλωσσολογίαLanguage and Linguisticsisi - Language & Linguistics covers resources relating to theoretical, literary and historical linguistics as well as stylistics and philology.isi - Linguistics covers resources relating to all theoretical and applied aspects of linguistics, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. The category also includes resources dealing with language as a social phenomenon such as sociolinguistics, language acquisition and education, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, semiotics and the relationship between memory and language.Επιστημονικό άρθροScientific articleΕργαστήριο Εθνογραφικών Προσεγγίσεων της Γλώσσας (ΕΕΠΓ)Greek Aggregator OpenArchives.gr | National Documentation Centre (EKT)