Abstract:The Men’s Rights movements have grown extensively in the last four decades. Social media platforms, especially online communities, have been instrumental in the rise of the movement. Despite this, few studies have directly examined how the Men’s Rights movement frames its grievance in online spaces or analyzed community reactions to user-contributed content. To fill these gaps, we analyze 70,580 posts contributed to /r/MensRights, a large community of Men’s Rights activists on Reddit, using a combination of to… Show more
“…Specifically, we look at users’ retweeting behaviors through which they participate in diffuse conversations online (Boyd et al, 2010). Since people tend to engage with content consistent with their political beliefs or coming from an ingroup source by commenting, sharing, or retweeting (Rafail & Freitas, 2019; Yuan et al, 2019), retweet networks are usually segregated into ideology-based clusters with a low level of connectivity (e.g., Conover et al, 2011). Hence, we expect that, as ordinary Twitter users tend to share messages from their ideological group, the two “fake news” discourses propagated within the liberal and conservative retweet networks should be highly disconnected (H3).…”
This article studies “fake news” beyond the consumption and dissemination of misinformation and disinformation. We uncover how the term “fake news” serves as a discursive device for ordinary citizens to consolidate group identity in everyday political utterances on Twitter. Using computational linguistic and network analyses, we demonstrate that over the period of 2016–2018, there is an uptrend in the use of identity language in US Twitter users’ discussions about “fake news,” manifested by the increased frequency of group pronouns in combination with issues and sentiments that boost one’s ingroup and derogate the outgroup. Furthermore, as opposed to the conventional wisdom that “fake news” is a right-wing term, we uncover two disconnected retweet networks surrounding liberal and conservative opinion leaders. Like-minded individuals selectively amplify ingroup messages to claim the power to define falsehood and make group-serving blame attributions. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings and offer new directions for future research on “fake news,” misinformation, and disinformation.
“…Specifically, we look at users’ retweeting behaviors through which they participate in diffuse conversations online (Boyd et al, 2010). Since people tend to engage with content consistent with their political beliefs or coming from an ingroup source by commenting, sharing, or retweeting (Rafail & Freitas, 2019; Yuan et al, 2019), retweet networks are usually segregated into ideology-based clusters with a low level of connectivity (e.g., Conover et al, 2011). Hence, we expect that, as ordinary Twitter users tend to share messages from their ideological group, the two “fake news” discourses propagated within the liberal and conservative retweet networks should be highly disconnected (H3).…”
This article studies “fake news” beyond the consumption and dissemination of misinformation and disinformation. We uncover how the term “fake news” serves as a discursive device for ordinary citizens to consolidate group identity in everyday political utterances on Twitter. Using computational linguistic and network analyses, we demonstrate that over the period of 2016–2018, there is an uptrend in the use of identity language in US Twitter users’ discussions about “fake news,” manifested by the increased frequency of group pronouns in combination with issues and sentiments that boost one’s ingroup and derogate the outgroup. Furthermore, as opposed to the conventional wisdom that “fake news” is a right-wing term, we uncover two disconnected retweet networks surrounding liberal and conservative opinion leaders. Like-minded individuals selectively amplify ingroup messages to claim the power to define falsehood and make group-serving blame attributions. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings and offer new directions for future research on “fake news,” misinformation, and disinformation.
“…Although these sites tend not to emphasize white supremacy explicitly, their focus on criticizing feminism and celebrating virile, heterosexual patriarchy provides a cohesive overlap to the gender politics of white nationalism. A backlash against feminism, particularly a critique that feminism has “gone too far” and is now victimizing men, is a central complaint in this online community (Rafail and Freitas 2019), as evidenced by the recent Twitter campaign “Him Too” that frames men as victims of false accusations of sexual assault. “Incels,” men who identify as involuntarily celibate, are a large part of this community (Donnelly et al.…”
This article asks how an anti‐racist, feminist anthropology can help us understand the expansion of the radical right, with a focus on the online white nationalist movement. It demonstrates how homophobia and anti‐feminism are two of many pathways into the online white nationalist movement. In effect, white nationalists work through online venues to racialize homophobia and anti‐feminism. They articulate a view of white racialization where gender and sexuality are central to ideas about biological and cultural superiority. Through tracing the linkages between gender, sexuality, and race in different ideations of the white nationalist movement, this article shows a continuity of these core ideas to white nationalism across different manifestations of the movement, even as the expression of them has changed. An aim of this article is to demonstrate the ways an anti‐racist, feminist anthropology provides tools to understand how concerns about gender animate this authoritarian movement.
“…The MRM's online visibility relative to its limited movement membership illustrates this, exemplified by the MRA participants in this study, most of whom saw themselves as MRM "followers" rather than "activists". This may reflect the dynamics of online activism, whereby individuals can support and engage with a movement's ideas anonymously and with minimal commitment (Rafail & Freitas, 2019).…”
Since #MeToo took the Internet by storm in 2017, it has had transnational social and legal ramifications. However, there has been little research on the repercussions of this movement for the ways in which masculinity has been politicized as questions around its meaning and place in gender relations were brought to the forefront of public discussions. Thirteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants from two Western Anglophone men’s groups, one embracing and one opposing feminist ideas. Our findings demonstrate a qualitative shift in contemporary expressions of “backlash” and “masculinity politics” in the #MeToo era compared to their initial formulations in the wake of the women’s and men’s movements of the 1960s to 1980s, shaped by novel tropes and tactics.
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