I tweet like a white person tbh! #whitewashed: examining the language of internalized racism and the policing of ethnic identity on Twitter

Using data extracted from Twitter, this study analyzes the English expression whitewashed as it occurs with and without a hashtag (e.g.: #whitewashed vs. whitewashed) through corpus analysis. As whitewashed has evolved to take on racial connotations to mean being too assimilated to a dominant white culture, I investigate whether the presence of a hashtag has an effect on how often this racial meaning of English whitewashed is employed. Based on collocative data, the findings suggest that the use of #whitewashed carries a meaning predominately informed by internalized racism and works to bind ethnic minorities to racial stereotypes. The study explores #whitewashed as a metacomment on human behavior, as #whitewashed serves to characterize beliefs about what actions are considered socially marked when performing an ethnic identity. In contrast to #whitewashed is the colloquial expression fobby, which characterizes an individual as being “too ethnic”; both (#)whitewashed and (#)fobby are discussed in tandem in this paper, for they create a double bind that marks the boundaries of ethnic identity. In this paper, I suggest that Twitter users mediate the demands of internalized racism by using #whitewashed to mark their tweets.     

England's green and pleasant land? examining racist prejudice in a rural context

Popular constructions of rural England have perpetuated images of idyllic, problem-free environments that have largely masked the process of ‘othering’ that works to marginalize particular groups within rural society. Drawing on the findings of studies conducted in two rural English counties, Chakraborti and Garland assert that racist prejudice is very much part of the reality of rural living for minority ethnic groups whose presence in the countryside tends to be overlooked. They discuss the perceptions of established white rural communities and those of the victims of racial harassment to illustrate the disturbing nature, extent and impact of racism in rural areas, and suggest that the enduring ‘invisibility’ of the problem is compounded both by the under-reporting of such racist incidents and the reluctance of agencies to acknowledge the needs of minority ethnic groups in the countryside. Consequently, racist prejudice in the rural context will only be recognized as a significant issue through a greater appreciation of the diverse complexity of rural space, and the abandonment of singular, outdated notions of rurality.     

Race,rape and capital punishment in Connecticut to 1830

ABSTRACT

Goodheart's narrative of the death penalty in early Connecticut argues that the racist depiction of black men as violent sexual predators who preyed on white women goes back hundreds of years and flourished in New England. The depiction of African American men as lascivious and dangerous was well established during slave times. The resulting prosecutorial treatment of black-on-white rape was remarkably consistent during the colonial and early national period. After the only white man was hanged for rape in 1693, the remaining five executions were all of Blacks. No one of any race was hanged for the rape of a Native American or African American woman. A marker of the marginalization of African Americans is that the final person hanged in Connecticut for a crime other than homicide was a black man for rape in 1817. This persistent pattern of prejudice is a telling example of the impact of race on criminal justice, especially the capital crime of rape.     

The comparative effectiveness of populist rhetoric in generating online engagement

Worldwide, voters are supporting populist candidates who promise to upend “politics as usual.” Despite all we know about populism, we still do not know how individuals respond to populist content during campaigns, particularly compared to other common content in liberal democracies. This paper adapts framing theory to an online electoral context to argue that populist campaign messages will generate more online engagement compared to three alternative conceptions of the relationship between the people and the elites: pluralism, technocracy, and neutral messages. The paper adapts Snow and Benford's seminal 1988 theory of resonance to studies of populist communication and assess whether populism resonates more with online social media users. An original dataset using the campaign Tweets of 22 national-level actors across five countries is used to test the theory: Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Italy, and Spain (N = 1777). The findings suggest that citizens on Twitter engage with populism more than its alternatives in certain contexts.     

Politics in 140 Characters or Less: Campaign Communication,Network Interaction,and Political Participation on Twitter

The methods by which politicians and policy makers communicate with the public are constantly adapting to the ever-changing media environment. As part of this changing landscape, this study considers the case of Twitter. Specifically, the authors conduct a survey of political Twitter users, in order to understand their use of the medium and their political behaviors within it. Results indicate that political Twitter users are more interested in and engaged in politics in general and less trusting of the mainstream media. Moreover, the study investigates the extent to which followers of a campaign may affect its overall influence in the Twitterverse.     

Breaking Down Barriers of Culture and Geography? Caring-at-a-Distance through Web 2.0

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes Join My Village (JMV), an NGO–corporation partnership that aims to “break down barriers of culture and geography” using the “power of online communities.” JMV uses Web 2.0 technologies to entice online users in the USA to engage with content about women’s lives in Malawi. Each time a user clicks on JMV content, the corporate partners donate money to the NGO. Using discourse analysis and interviews, I examine how JMV encourages users to care about distant others and with what effects. I draw attention to the use of Web 2.0 in the campaign in terms of how distant others become entangled in social media users’ everyday lives and the types of engagement JMV encourages. I conclude that while JMV offers some possibilities for caring-at-a-distance, the contradictory messaging and the corporate aspects of the campaign need more critical analysis.     

Values and candidate evaluation: How voters respond to allegations of sexual harassment

How do voters respond to candidates accused of sexual harassment? The literature on political scandals demonstrates that candidate characteristics, scandal type, and voter characteristics matter; as well as party affiliation. However, empirical evidence suggests that not all co-partisans react the same way. Why is this the case? Our study uses Schwartz's (1996) theory of values to hypothesise that voters prioritising ‘universalism’ and ‘benevolence’ are less likely to vote for candidates accused of sexual harassment compared to voters who prioritise ‘self-enhancement’ values. Using an original, mixed methods, online survey experiment (n = 704), we show that American voters do become less favourable towards candidates linked to allegations of sexual harassment; but a sizeable minority would nevertheless vote for a co-partisan candidate accused of sexual harassment. Values are an important mechanism to explain this heterogeneity. Qualitative data corroborates our findings, and helps explain why sexual harassment allegations are not always a barrier to electoral success.     

Practices of Implementation of Sexual Harassment Policies: Individual Versus Collective Strategies1

abstract This article examines the implementation of sexual harassment law in the workplace in Germany and the United States. Both countries have developed different approaches to the issue, with certain trade‐offs for the pursuit of gender equality and changes in gender workplace culture. Germany has developed a corporatist, collective strategy. Yet, few German employers have adopted policies and training programs. New policy approaches focus on sexual harassment as a group‐based, but gender‐neutral, issue in the context of general unfair workplace practices of “mobbing.” In contrast, sexual harassment is primarily understood as an individual rights issue in the U.S. This approach emphasizes individual (internal) redress. Social and organizational change comes at a high cost for individuals who have been harassed. Employers’ practices in both countries have turned sexual harassment into a gender‐neutral issue. I conclude that a synthesis of both individual and collective approaches with an explicit focus on gender inequality would be desirable.     

Developing a rhetorical analysis of racist humour: examining anti-black jokes on the Internet

Racist humour is frequently the subject of media and public debate in relation to issues of offence and acceptability. Despite this, little has been done to analyse it or its relationship to other forms of racism. I argue that an analysis of racist humour needs to account for the rhetorical structures of humour – to consider humour as a rhetorical device similar to metaphor or metonym – that has a persuasive potential. Using jokes from four US websites, the rhetorical aspects of humour are unpacked through the use of rhetorical discourse analysis and semiotic theories of humour. I then identify an important effect of racist humour. Zygmunt Bauman's ideas on the problem of ambivalence for dichotomous discourse and category formation are employed to argue that racist humour expresses racist dichotomies and has the potential, among others, to “hide” the ambivalence to which such dichotomies are prone. The article then considers the meaning and ambivalence of less severe racist joking.     

Women's Authority in Patriarchal Social Movements: The Case of Female Salafi Preachers

How do women gain authority in the public sphere, especially in contexts where patriarchal norms are prevalent? I argue that the leaders of patriarchal social movements face pragmatic incentives to expand women's authority roles when seeking new movement members. Women authorities help patriarchal movements by making persuasive, identity-based arguments in favor of patriarchy that men cannot, and by reaching new audiences that men cannot. I support this argument by examining the rise of online female preachers in the Islamist Salafi movement, using interviews, Twitter analysis, and automated text analysis of 21,000 texts by 172 men and 43 women on the Salafi-oriented website saaid.net. To show the theory's generality, I also apply it to the contemporary white nationalist movement in the United States. The findings illustrate how movements that aggressively enforce traditional gender roles for participants can nevertheless increase female authority for pragmatic political reasons.     

Cyber-Extremism: Isis and the Power of Social Media

The current crises in Syria has led to a number of Britons travelling abroad to fight with groups such as Isis. Capitalising on this growth, Isis are now increasingly fighting an online cyber war, with the use of slick videos, online messages of hate and even an app that all aim to radicalise and create a new generation of cyber jihadists. These modern day tools are helping Isis spread their propaganda and ideology to thousands of online sympathisers across the world. Indeed, the group has actively been using social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to recruit new would be members. This is being done through images and the streaming of violent online viral videos filmed and professionally edited that are targeting young and impressionable people. Portraying a glamorised and ‘cool’ image, Isis fighters are beginning to act as the new rock stars of global cyber jihad. The Internet therefore is becoming the virtual playground for extremist views to be reinforced and act as an echo chamber. This study analysed 100 different Facebook pages and 50 Twitter user accounts which generated over 2050 results and helped the author create a typology of seven key behaviour characteristics and motivations. The findings in this study confirmed the author’s original hypothesis, i.e. online hate is being used by groups such as Isis for a variety of reasons such as recruitment and propaganda. Moreover, this material is coordinated and controlled by Isis as a means for publishing and sending out key messages.     

The Effectiveness of a Racialized Counterstrategy

Our article examines whether a politician charging a political candidate's implicit racial campaign appeal as racist is an effective political strategy. According to the racial priming theory, this racialized counterstrategy should deactivate racism, thereby decreasing racially conservative whites’ support for the candidate engaged in race baiting. We propose an alternative theory in which racial liberals, and not racially conservative whites, are persuaded by this strategy. To test our theory, we focused on the 2016 presidential election. We ran an experiment varying the politician (by party and race) calling an implicit racial appeal by Donald Trump racist. We find that charging Trump's campaign appeal as racist does not persuade racially conservative whites to decrease support for Trump. Rather, it causes racially liberal whites to evaluate Trump more unfavorably. Our results hold up when attentiveness, old‐fashioned racism, and partisanship are taken into account. We also reproduce our findings in two replication studies.     

A comparative study of Twitter utilization in disaster management between public and private organizations

Twitter has become a commonly used platform by both public and private organizations to assist with the dissemination of information related to disaster management. This research makes use of a mixed‐method approach in determining the extent and manner in which Twitter is used to disseminate disaster management information by both public and private organizations. This research found that public organizations are bound by strict regulations resulting in a lower volume and smaller variety of disaster‐related information being disseminated. The nature of an organization and the processes of decision making therein are suggested to influence the ability of an organization to successfully use Twitter as an effective tool for disaster management. Organizations in Thailand currently underutilize Twitter for disaster management, as neither public nor private organizations use Twitter as a multidirectional communication disaster management tool.     

Politics as usual? Assessing the extent and content of candidate-level online campaigning at the 2015 UK general election

There has been much work done investigating the adoption of online campaigns in UK general election campaigns. Although some research has focussed on the candidate-level (Gibson, R., W. Lusoli, and S. Ward. 2008. “Nationalizing and Normalizing the Local? A Comparative Analysis of Online Candidate Campaigning in Australia and Britain.” Journal of Information Technology and Politics 4: 15–30; Lee, B. 2014. “Window Dressing 2.0: Constituency-level Web Campaigns in the 2010 UK General Election.” Politics 34 (1): 45–57; Southern, R. 2015. “Is Web 2.0 Providing a Voice for Outsiders? A Comparison of Personal Web Site and Social Media Use by Candidates at the 2010 UK General Election.” Journal of Information Technology &; Politics 12 (1): 1–17), this is an under-researched area. This is despite early web-campaign scholars (Margolis, M., and D. Resnick. 2000. Politics as Usual: The Cyberspace Revolution. Sage) maintaining that e-campaigning could provide the most important advantages to campaigns at the candidate level. In light of this, the paper aims to provide the most comprehensive study of candidate-level online campaigning carried out in the UK to date. This paper employs original data, measuring website and social media use by candidates during the 2015 UK general election campaign. These data allow for a detailed explanation of the normalization thesis, one of the leading theories in the field of e-campaigns. The findings here are significant as there are several instances where normalization does not hold, suggesting that online tools are contributing to campaign change. Green Party candidates subverted normalization to a significant degree, particularly on social media. Assessing the campaign content, a quarter of candidates adopted more than one interactive feature on their website and furthermore, interactive use of Twitter was the most common type of Twitter use.     

When Treatments are Tweets: A Network Mobilization Experiment over Twitter

This study rigorously compares the effectiveness of online mobilization appeals via two randomized field experiments conducted over the social microblogging service Twitter. In the process, we demonstrate a methodological innovation designed to capture social effects by exogenously inducing network behavior. In both experiments, we find that direct, private messages to followers of a nonprofit advocacy organization’s Twitter account are highly effective at increasing support for an online petition. Surprisingly, public tweets have no effect at all. We additionally randomize the private messages to prime subjects with either a “follower” or an “organizer” identity but find no evidence that this affects the likelihood of signing the petition. Finally, in the second experiment, followers of subjects induced to tweet a link to the petition are more likely to sign it—evidence of a campaign gone “viral.” In presenting these results, we contribute to a nascent body of experimental literature exploring political behavior in online social media.     

Does Twitter Increase Perceived Police Legitimacy?

Social media use has become increasingly popular among police forces. The literature suggests that social media use can increase perceived police legitimacy by enabling transparency and participation. Employing data from a large and representative survey of Dutch citizens (N = 4,492), this article tests whether and how social media use affects perceived legitimacy for a major social media platform, Twitter. A negligible number of citizens engage online with the police, and thus the findings reveal no positive relationship between participation and perceived legitimacy. The article shows that by enhancing transparency, Twitter does increase perceived police legitimacy, albeit to a limited extent. Subsequent analysis of the mechanism shows both an affective and a cognitive path from social media use to legitimacy. Overall, the findings suggest that establishing a direct channel with citizens and using it to communicate successes does help the police strengthen their legitimacy, but only slightly and for a small group of interested citizens.     

Tweeting for peace: Experimental evidence from the 2016 Colombian Plebiscite

The decades-long Colombian civil war nearly came to an official end with the 2016 Peace Plebiscite, which was ultimately defeated in a narrow vote. This conflict has deeply divided Colombian civil society, and non-political public figures have played a crucial role in structuring debate on the topic. To understand the mechanisms underlying the influence of members of civil society on political discussion, we performed a randomized experiment on Colombian Twitter users shortly before this election. Sampling from a pool of subjects who had been frequently tweeting about the Plebiscite, we tweeted messages that encouraged subjects to consider different aspects of the decision. We varied the identity (a general, a scientist, and a priest) of the accounts we used and the content of the messages we sent. We found little evidence that any of our interventions were successful in persuading subjects to change their attitudes. However, we show that our pro-Peace messages encouraged liberal Colombians to engage in significantly more public deliberation on the subject.     

African international students in Klang Valley: colonial legacies,postcolonial racialization,and sub-citizenship

This article examines the experiences of African international students attending universities around the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur. I draw upon participant-observations, interviews, and discussions with international students from several African nations and Malaysian citizens of various ethnicities. Malaysian educational programs are actively marketed in Africa, where many students and their families are motivated to pursue an affordable English-language education in an Asian nation. However, African students face an unfriendly and racist reception in the greater Klang Valley area. Persisting colonial legacies of white supremacy, global flows of negative images of Blacks, and newly emergent meta-cultural circulation of representations of Africans-cum-‘Nig(g)erians’ as predatory males shape their experiences of exclusion from cosmopolitan citizenship. I argue that African international students are cast into a low grade of cultural citizenship that cuts across zones of graduated sovereignty. African students adapt to this urban context, perform acts of citizenship, and attempt to foster cosmopolitan relations among themselves and in the broader society. Moments of critical cosmopolitanism from Malaysians are rare and need to be expanded.