Anti-Muslim semantic framing by politicians, Facebook groups, and violent extremists

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that semantic framing can reveal bias and racism. The current study introduces a novel method for locating frames in texts, and employs this method to find frames for Muslims, Europeans and Australians in a range of texts by anti-Muslim and non-anti-Muslim authors. The study finds that several derogatory frames previously associated with racism are applied to Muslims in the anti-Muslim texts, supporting studies showing that anti-Muslim bias resembles other forms of racism. Moreover, different frames are preferred by more and less extreme anti-Muslim authors, with certain frames predominating in the manifestos of white supremacist gunmen. These frames may be a warning sign that frame users are potentially prone to violence.

Three levels of framing

“…A word evokes the same semantic frame whether it is used metaphorically or non-metaphorically (Sullivan, 2006(Sullivan, , 2013(Sullivan, , 2017, which helps demonstrate how metaphoric language is similar to non-metaphoric language. Applying frame semantic methods to metaphoric language facilitates the automatic recognition and analysis of metaphors in a text corpus, for example (Dodge et al, 2015;Lederer, 2016;Sullivan, 2022).…”