Political influencers as flashpoints for manufactured online aggression

Seargeant, Philip and Giaxoglou, Korina (2024). Political influencers as flashpoints for manufactured online aggression. In: Blitvitch Garces-Conejos, Pilar and Georgakopoulou, Alexandra eds. Affect, hate and relationality in the discourse of, with and about influencers. Pragmatics and beyond. Amsterdam, NL: John Benjamins Publishing Company (In Press).

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.