Year: 2024
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: In the context of the literature on practices of social media influencers, little attention has been paid, so far, to the emerging category of political influencers. This chapter examines the social media feed of a political influencer as a site of antagonistic political debate generating audience outrage. Drawing on digital ethnography and digital discourse analysis, we focus on a media event centring around a tweet posted by the British journalist Ash Sarkar on the date upon which three people were killed in a terrorist incident in a park in Reading, UK. The tweet unleashed a storm of abuse targeted at Sarkar from people erroneously relating its content to the killings. Our analysis reconstructs how this post and reactions to it created lines of dis/alignment around broad antagonistic and reactionary online discourses as a strategy of weaponizing and communicating outrage against this type of political influencer.
Authors: Seargeant, Philip, Giaxoglou, Korina
Institution: The Open University
Language: English
Topic: Social Media and Politics
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7014677095
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