Online conflict informs new social facts in cyberspace and beyond. This study aims to investigate the discursive construction of polylogal conflict (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2018) and identity (Blommaert & de Fina, 2017; Bucholtz & Hall, 2005) and the underexplored role of multilingualism therein in an online community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) through scaling analysis (Blommaert, 2007; 2010; 2015; 2021) based on a case study of Li Ziqi's YouTube channel. Differing from the current interactionist and CDA studies on online conflict and identity (e.g., Cosper, 2022; Sagredos & Nikolova, 2022), this study adopts sociolinguistics scales to both interactionally and critically delineate the complexity, polycentricity (Blommaert, 2010, p. 39), and dynamics of online conflict and identity in multilingual cyberspace. Screen-based data were collected from popular comments below two controversial videos arousing cultural spats over certain fermented vegetables through observation and archiving as cyberethnographic approaches. Moment Analysis (Li, 2011) is adopted to examine prominent conflictual discourse involving scaling moves illuminating stance-making and identification. Special attention was paid to metalinguistic comments as a source of a more emic perspective of the interactions. It is found that online CoP members draw on scaling resources to make social meanings, position themselves, and discursively construct identities in online conflicts. They flexibly downscale, upscale, or outscale to anchor authority and authenticity, legitimize "us", delegitimize "others", handle conflicts, and construct individual or collective identities. Multilingualism, in forms of truncated repertoire or grassroots literacy enabled by technological affordances, is utilized to upscale and reach a wider readership, either for winning more allies or for further humiliation of the "other". Metalinguistic comments on code choices further demonstrate language ideologies and power struggles among interactants. These findings indicate that the seemingly flattened internet offers another arena for conflicts, deep-rooted identity-related language ideologies, and the invisible boundaries extended from offline geopolitics in cyberspace.
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