Social representations of sociopolitical groups on r/The_Donald and emergent conflict narratives: A qualitative content analysis

Abstract

Social media has been integral for the organization and success of right-wing populist movements in the United States and Europe. Within online communities, discussions take place in which ideologies are formulated, iterated upon, and disseminated. One particular forum, hosted on the popular website reddit.com, r/The_Donald, has received media attention for its political influence. Despite the influence of online spaces in populist, far-right movements, relatively little attention has been paid to qualitative content of discussions that take place within such spaces, including r/The_Donald. Guided by a social representations approach, we analyzed how discussions on r/The_Donald represent sociopolitical groups. We focused on discussions of political affiliations, race relations, immigration, and culture. From a dataset of 8,198 posts, we selected 1,292 segments from 883 unique Reddit usernames and analyzed them using qualitative content analysis. The results showed that the majority of posts discussed liberals, race relations, and conspiracy theories, and in these posts, liberals and liberal ideas were delegitimized and mocked through their representations. These posts represented conservatives through antinomic contrast and comparison to liberals and liberal policies. The meanings of those representations in intergroup relations are discussed.

Angry Enough to Riot: An Analysis of In-Group Membership, Misinformation, and Violent Rhetoric on TheDonald.win Between Election Day and Inauguration

“…From there, coders were asked to identify one of 14 possible topic options. The topic options were determined based on a combination of open-ended pretesting using a subsample and work done by McLamore and Uluğ (2020) in qualitatively grouping social representations and included: General election information, election fraud, COVID-19, China, Communism/Socialism, the Democratic Party, Reddit/tech censorship, guns, protests and demonstrations, Muslims/Islam, Christianity, the media, and the January 6 riots.…”

Enriching Abusive Language Detection with Community Context

“…This phenomenon is easily observed on Reddit, where community structure is an explicit component of platform design. For example, the majority of comments on the pro-Trump subreddit The_Donald delegitimize liberal ideas (McLamore and Ulug, 2020;Soliman et al, 2019). Similarly, a collection of "manosphere" subreddits espouse misogynistic ideologies (Stewart and Spiro, 2021;Ging, 2019).…”