Flooding the feed: the politics of social media sharing among defensive publics

Abstract

What political significance do widely-shared sources on social media carry? Efforts at documenting media content have produced useful insights about political phenomena, including right-wing populist movements that have recently been theorized as comprising defensive publics which seek to preserve social, economic, and cultural hierarchies that privilege white “nationals.” In France, the concept of defensive publics is particularly useful for understanding how right-wing identitarian and nationalist actors use social media to mobilize publics to defend hierarchies framed as under siege by immigration, multiculturalism, and global liberal elites. Building on literature about illiberal communication and the illiberal public sphere, we argue that patterns of sources’ visibility – not just content – also serve defensive purposes. Using computational analysis of 1.16 million French language immigration-related posts on Twitter/X and ideological embeddings of 44,810 of these users, we show how far-right-leaning users flood feeds with hyper-partisan sources, particularly on immigration, although they also share ideologically varied sources. Then, interviews with 13 high-profile far-right-affiliated posters who include senior French politicians reveal how these practices support defensive political aims. Sharing hyper-partisan sources outside the “elitist” mainstream redresses perceived censorship by mainstream media, while sharing mainstream sources signals credibility and respectability, even as these actors maintain critiques of the very same media. Meanwhile, reposting sources with statistical and quantitative evidence serves to obscure overtly white supremacist ideologies while advancing anti-immigration agendas. We conclude that sharing practices themselves function as rhetorical resources that highly-visible members of defensive publics use to reassert symbolic and political dominance in a contested media environment.

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ORCID for William Allen: orcid.org/0000-0003-3185-1468

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