“Beware of Him—He’s a Scammer Selling Fake Tickets”: A Pragmatic Study of Saudi Ticket Scam Warnings on X

Abstract

Little research has examined the pragmatic structure of Arabic digital warning discourse. The present study aims to address this gap by investigating how Saudi users on X (formerly Twitter) construct public warning acts against ticket scams during Riyadh Season. It explores how these warnings are linguistically and culturally shaped and what politeness strategies users employ to intensify or mitigate face-threatening acts. The dataset comprises authentic Saudi digital discourse, including tweets, replies, and quoted posts related to ticket-scam incidents. Each warning message was qualitatively analysed for its explicit or implicit fulfilment of felicity conditions and its politeness strategy.  The findings show that bald-on-record strategies overwhelmingly dominate Saudi digital warning discourse, indicating that users prioritize urgency and clarity over face-saving considerations when alerting the public. The highly explicit realisation of the Propositional Content, Sincerity, and Essential conditions suggests that Saudi users treat warning acts as high-stakes, socially consequential speech events where explicitness strengthens illocutionary force and minimizes the risk of misinterpretation.  The study highlights that Saudi digital warnings are intentional and effective in high-risk contexts for community protection.  The study contributes to the underexplored area of Arabic digital warnings about online fraud, offering new insights into how warning acts are pragmatically constructed in rapid, high-risk digital contexts.