Abstract
This chapter takes a mixed methods approach to review the potential influence that Donald Trump’s rhetoric may have on the Facebook comments posted on stories published by conservative media in the United States that mention Islam or Muslims. Both qualitative and quantitative content analysis was used to identify Islamophobic rhetoric and imagery. This study suggests that the rhetoric of Trump appears to contribute to a growing form of Islamophobic partisan hegemony on the political right. The results of this study showed that within right-wing media, more than 20% of Facebook comments on stories that relate to Islam or Muslims were Islamophobic. These results suggest an increasing pattern among the political right in the United States of social media commentary that dehumanize or otherize Muslims is part and parcel of this community’s accepted rhetoric. Furthermore, it suggests that the influence of Trump has made the public willing to present material that would be unlikely to be accepted if posted about other minority groups. The study does suggest that not all conservative news sources or Trump’s Facebook page itself receive Islamophobic comments equally. However, it intimates that networked gatekeeping (the removal of posts by the companies that manage the news source) likely has a larger influence on which news sources had little to no Islamophobic content as opposed to any real differences in opinion of those who commented.
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Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their comments and to Dr. Adebowale Akande for his professorial editorial assistance.
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Speakman, B., Bagasra, A. (2023). The Trump Effect: A Journalistic Discourse Analysis of Islamophobic Rhetoric in Facebook Comments. In: Akande, A. (eds) The Perils of Populism. Springer Studies on Populism, Identity Politics and Social Justice. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36343-6_12
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