Abstract
Security studies literature neglects social media’s potential for lay actors to become influential within security debates. This article develops the concept of ‘security influencers’, bringing literature from marketing into the security debate to understand how social media enables individuals to ‘speak’ and contest security and how lay actors exert influence. Methodologically, this article applies a multi-methods approach to 27,367 tweets to identify and analyse the top four most influential actors in 48 hours following the 2017 bombings by keywords ‘Manchester’ and ‘Muslims’. This article builds a typology of security influencers nuancing definitions of the passive ‘security broadcaster’ and the active ‘security engager’, both of which emerge from obscurity or influence within non-security domains. Furthermore, a dichotomy emerges within influential messages and contestation; messages discussing Muslims in banal terms as diverse individuals register high levels of agreement, whereas those discussing Islam as a world religion receive more hostility and contestation.
Highlights
Security studies literature neglects social media’s potential for lay actors to become influential within security debates
This article intervenes in this understudied field posing the research question ‘How do security influencers emerge on social media?’ So, this article contributes to understandings of constructivist security through analysing social media outputs to understand who is influential in the security debate and how
We identify that non-security elites on social media become influential in ways similar to that of established security elites
Summary
This article seeks to intervene within constructivist debates on security and requires grounding in both hierarchical theory such as the Copenhagen School and flatter Vernacular security studies discussion. This demonstrates how neither hierarchical nor flat theories accurately account for differentiation of actors’ influence when speaking about security on social media. To account for this question of influence and allow us to typologise the security influencer, we must account for digital marketing literature considering social influence and influencers. Manchester occurred within, and gave renewed impetus to debates about the place of Muslims in British society and the wider integration debate
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