The flood, the traitors, and the protectors: affect and white identity in the Internet Research Agency's Islamophobic propaganda on Twitter

Between 2015 and 2017, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) - a Kremlin-backed "troll farm" based in St. Petersburg - executed a propaganda campaign on Twitter to target US voters. Scholarship has expended relatively little effort to study the role of Islamophobia in the IRA's propagand...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEthnic and racial studies Vol. 47; no. 5; pp. 982 - 1008
Main Authors Ganesh, Bharath, Faggiani, Nicolò
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London Routledge 03.04.2024
Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
Subjects
Affect
Campaigns
Disinformation
Emotions
Ethnic identity
Identity
Internet
Islam
Islamophobia
Muslims
Propaganda
Right wing politics
Social media
Social movements
Topic model
Traitors
Visual methods
Voters
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Summary:Between 2015 and 2017, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) - a Kremlin-backed "troll farm" based in St. Petersburg - executed a propaganda campaign on Twitter to target US voters. Scholarship has expended relatively little effort to study the role of Islamophobia in the IRA's propaganda campaign. Following critical disinformation research, this article demonstrates that Islamophobia, affect, and white identity played a crucial role in the IRA's targeting of right-wing US voters. With an official release of tweets and associated visual content from Twitter, we use topic modeling and visual analysis to explore both how, and to what extent, the IRA used Islamophobia in its propaganda. To do so, we develop a multimodal distant reading technique to study how the IRA aligned users with contemporary far right social movements by deploying racial and emotional appeals that center on narrating a transnational white identity under threat from Islam and Muslims.
ISSN:0141-9870
1466-4356
DOI:10.1080/01419870.2023.2268180