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Part of
Influencer Discourse: Affective relations and identities
Edited by Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Alexandra Georgakopoulou
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 349] 2024
► pp. 128–147

Chapter 5
🍊🍊🍊: Political influencers as flashpoints for manufactured online aggression

| The Open University
| The Open University
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.
Keywords: political influencers, social media influencers, online antagonism, politics of outrage, emoji, polystorying, rescripting, chronotopes
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The political influencer
  • 3.Research focus and theoretical approach
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1The instigating post
    • 4.2The metasemiotics of emoji
    • 4.3Fabricating an anti-story
  • 5.Conclusion: The Sarkar effect
  • Note
  • References
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