Contesting #StopIslam: The Dynamics of a Counter-narrative Against Right-wing Populism

Elizabeth Poole,Eva Giraud,Ed De Quincey

doi:10.16995/olh.406

Abstract

This paper sets out quantitative findings from a research project examining the dynamics of online counter-narratives against hate speech, focusing on #StopIslam, a hashtag that spread racialized hate speech and disinformation directed towards Islam and Muslims and which trended on Twitter after the March 2016 terror attacks in Brussels. We elucidate the dynamics of the counter-narrative through contrasting it with the affordances of the original anti-Islamic narrative it was trying to contest. We then explore the extent to which each narrative was taken up by the mainstream media. Our findings show that actors who disseminated the original hashtag with the most frequency were tightly-knit clusters of self-defined conservative actors based in the US. The hashtag was also routinely used in relation to other pro-Trump, anti-Clinton hashtags in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, forming part of a broader, racialized, anti-immigration narrative. In contrast, the most widely shared and disseminated messages were attempts to challenge the original narrative that were produced by a geographically dispersed network of self-identified Muslims and allies. The counter-narrative was significant in gaining purchase in the wider media ecology associated with this event, due to being reported by mainstream media outlets. We ultimately argue for the need for further research that combines ‘big data’ approaches with a conceptual focus on the broader media ecologies in which counter-narratives emerge and circulate, in order to better understand how opposition to hate speech can be sustained in the face of the tight-knit right-wing networks that often outlast dissenting voices.

Highlights

On 22 March 2016 the hashtag #StopIslam began to trend on the social media platform Twitter, after 32 members of the public were killed and 300 injured in terrorist attacks in Brussels for which Islamic State claimed responsibility
That uses of social media to spread the values of the far right should not be trivialised; beyond this particular discursive event it is clear that increased political legitimacy is being afforded to these opinions
In this article we traced the dynamics of the Islamophobic Twitter hashtag #StopIslam and found that at the point when the hashtag was shared the most frequently, it was not primarily being used to circulate anti-Islamic sentiment but had been appropriated by users seeking to contest hate speech

Summary

Introduction

On 22 March 2016 the hashtag #StopIslam began to trend on the social media platform Twitter, after 32 members of the public were killed and 300 injured in terrorist attacks in Brussels for which Islamic State claimed responsibility. In the immediate aftermath of the Brussels bombing, #StopIslam grew to prominence, drawing mainstream media attention after it was used in 412,353 tweets (including both posts and retweets) in the 24 hours after the attacks, with almost 40,000 tweets per hour at its peak. This use of social media appeared to crystallize a European political context wherein overtly anti-Muslim narratives had become entangled with broader concerns about immigration, in the wake of the refugee crisis (Holmes and Castañeda, 2016; Khiabany, 2016; Wilson and Mavelli, 2016). The rise of xenophobic nationalism, for instance, has most notably been evidenced in discourses surrounding key events such as: Brexit (Green et al, 2016); the near electoral victory of Austria’s far right Freedom Party (Rheindorf and Wodak, 2017); and the election of Donald Trump as US president (Kellner, 2016)

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