Social media has changed the nature of political organization, discourse, and engagement. From likes, retweets, shares, and memes, everyday users have an amplified voice in the online, public-political sphere. Since 2004 with Howard Dean's attempt to gain momentum for the Democratic candidacy and even more evident in the 2008 elections and the advent of Twitter and YouTube, the emergence of online political campaigns, political theatrics, and political discourse are everyday occurrences (Highfield, 2016). Due in part to the access afforded by social media, individual supporters have new ways to engage with, voice concern for, and even criticize political leaders (Garimella, Weber, & De Choudhury, 2016). With everyday individuals being able to take part in the political process, scholars have directed efforts toward social media to understand the changing research landscape (for a review and study of online information sources, see Nikolav, Oliveira, Flammini, & Menczer, 2015). Some have explored the nature of political candidates' social media campaigns and web presence to find that certain candidates are lightning rods of support and criticism (DiGrazia, McKelvey, Bollen, & Rojas, 2013). Although U.S. Presidential campaigns have long been sources of fierce conversation and polarizing discourse, the 2016 campaign has been characterized by veteran journalist, Dan Rather, in the following way: This has been sort of a dumpster fire of an election campaign, in which both sides, and I'm not giving false equivalency here, one side more than the other-racism, chauvinism, some jingoism, 790763S MSXXX10.

No abstract

The present study examined how identity is affectively organized online in an online men’s rights community, responding to calls to explore how sites like Reddit serve as spaces that host and support varied misogynist language and communities. We utilized scholarship of affective organizing and communicative constitution of organizations to study the identity construction through the social and communicative processes that facilitate and limit online communication. We analyzed 35,643 comments from a popular men’s rights community to interrogate how affective and gendered organizing contributed to identity construction using text mining, semantic network analyses, and qualitative analyses. Our findings revealed that affect was not merely prominent in the forum but served as a constitutive means through which the members of the men’s rights community constructed their identity individually and within their Reddit community. We advance an affect-centered approach within organizational communication scholarship, theorizing how masculinity is constituted through the interplay of affective contradictions, affective sensemaking, and affective identification.

In this study, we revisit alternative feminist organizing in order to identify the dialectical tensions, paradoxical discourses, and agentic qualities of women’s participation in an online antifeminist space. We engage in text mining, semantic network analysis, and the constant comparative method to identify dialogical tensions and the paradoxical organizing strategies of Red Pill Women, an online community on the social networking platform, Reddit. Through analyzing Red Pill Women as an antifeminist space constituted through postfeminist logics, we identify three paradoxical tensions, begin to disentangle postfeminism from antifeminism, and build on alternative organizing theory with recent work on hidden and invisible organizations to further theorize gendered (in)visibility and (anti)feminist organizing practices.

No abstract