Fandom and Polarization in Online Political Discussion: From Pop Culture to Politics 3031140389, 9783031140389

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Fandom and Polarization in Online Political Discussion From Pop Culture to Politics Renee Barnes

Fandom and Polarization in Online Political Discussion

Renee Barnes

Fandom and Polarization in Online Political Discussion From Pop Culture to Politics

Renee Barnes University of the Sunshine Coast Sippy Downs, QLD, Australia

ISBN 978-3-031-14038-9    ISBN 978-3-031-14039-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14039-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Malte Mueller | Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To B and D

Acknowledgements

There are always many people who make a book possible, and I won’t possibly be able to mention them all. First and foremost, the participants who gave up their time to talk to me and complete surveys. On a personal note, my husband and daughter for excusing me from many moments of family time so that I could complete this work. On a professional note, my colleagues at the University of the Sunshine Coast for providing me such amazing support. A special mention to those at Boston College’s Communication Department who not only provided me with a professional home for my United States data collection, but illuminated my work with so many great corridor ‘American culture’ conversations. And finally, my reviewers, in particular Peter English and Renee Middlemost, who provided invaluable thoughts and suggestions.

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Contents

1 Introduction:  Polarization, Fandom and Meeting in the Middle  1 2 Getting  Down in the Muck: Polarization and Online Debate 13 3 Finding  the Fan and Anti-fan: Fan Studies as an Interpretative Frame for Political Polarization 37 4 Loving to Hate: Fandom Fuelling Polarized Behaviour 61 5 Can We Debate Away the Hate? 87 6 ‘Fake news,’ Polarization and Fan-like Behaviours107 7 Conclusion:  Politics and the Political Informed by Fandom129 Method Appendix141 References157 Index161 ix

About the Author

Renee  Barnes is a senior lecturer in journalism at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia. Her research focuses on online participatory ­culture and her first book Uncovering Commenting Culture: Trolls, Lurkers and Fanboys (Palgrave Macmillan 2018) examines the role of online commentary in society. She has also published widely in leading journals including New Media and Society, Digital Journalism and Journalism Practice.

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List of Tables

Table 4.1 Table A.1 Table A.2 Table A.3 Table A.4 Table A.5 Table A.6

Feelings associated with taking part in a political discussion by political affiliation 73 Australian commenter interviews: Participant details 147 The Group interviews: Participant details 149 Survey demographics 151 Survey demographics: Self-reported political orientation by country 151 Political affiliation by comment frequency of survey respondents152 Stages of thematic analysis 153

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Polarization, Fandom and Meeting in the Middle

When I began the study that informs this book in 2019, the world was deep into what many thought was an unprecedented era of polarization. President Donald Trump Jr had been victorious in the November 2016 US election, despite widespread coverage of his personality and policy flaws. Likewise, the UK had stunningly voted to exit the European Union in the Brexit referendum of the June prior, despite extensive media coverage warning of the economic and social consequences. In Australia, my own home, these trends were also emerging with the rise in profile and popularity of minor parties such as One Nation, Katter’s Australian Party and Palmer United Party, who all stood based on platforms of exclusion and simplistic economic reform. These unexpected wins for populist agendas seemed to be spreading across the globe, and there was renewed vigour in examining what caused these deep divisions and how we might encourage more reasoned and rational debate. The scholarly focus of these investigations was almost always focused on the role of technology and in particular social media to amplify “the polarization issue”. But was it as simple as saying that social media was responsible for this upsurge in political fragmentation? I have always spent time in the comment threads following news stories, firstly on news websites and, later, on social media platforms, when the platforms became the home of news article-based discussion. My interest is both professional and personal. Prior to joining academia, I worked as a journalist in Australia, and at the end of my time in the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Barnes, Fandom and Polarization in Online Political Discussion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14039-6_1

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newsroom in the early 2000s, I spent much of my working day interacting with my readers in the comment threads following stories. I have also focused my research on these spaces, examining what it is that makes people engage through discussion at the end of news stories and why they behave the way they do there. However, I also have a deep personal interest in these spaces. Despite the ridicule that comes with admitting you like online comment threads, I have always found them informative (understanding how others with differing perspectives to mine interpret news events) and even enjoyable (in the humorous and witty responses and sometimes even the responses that seem so unhinged or inaccurate). Despite this interest, I rarely if ever join these discussions, fuelling my desire to know more about the people who do take part. Despite frequent lamentations of those who inhabit “below the line” as crazy, angry miscreants, I observed an intense and affective investment in participatory politics. It is this investment as it relates to polarization that this book seeks to uncover. In particular, the book attempts to take a different approach, through the application of a fandom interpretative framework, to answering the fundamental research questions of: How does polarization manifest in online political debate? What factors influence polarization in individuals in online political discussion? There are numerous studies (many of which I examine in more detail throughout the book) that have attempted to answer these questions, but what I have sought to do in this study is take a different approach; one that moves beyond a Habermasian (1991) frame for political discussion, which privileges rationality and deliberation. Such a framework only serves to relegate the investigation of partisanship and polarization exhibited in online political discussion, as a measure of quality. Instead, I have drawn on a fan-based framework to refocus investigation to the underlying factors that influence these debates—identity performance, entertainment, and affective investment. I have done this using a qualitative approach, one that is aligned with the fan studies tradition. I draw on almost three years of observations of comment threads following news stories shared by US and Australian media organisations, as well as 12 months in a closed Facebook group designed to elicit discussion about politics. I also draw on interviews with Australian news commenters and survey results from Australian and American news commenters. What follows in this

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introductory chapter is an outline of some of the key concepts that I have based my study on; and to a large extent what has been excluded and why. I also outline a summary of the chapters that follow.

What Exactly is Polarization? As outlined in Chap. 2, polarization is about division, but more specifically it refers to a particularly sharp division between two groups or sets of opinions or beliefs. Polarization is also typically divided into elite and mass. Elite refers to polarization of party elites (e.g. politicians and party leaders) and mass polarization—the greater public or average citizens (see Kubin and von Sikorski 2021). This book is concerned with mass polarization, in that it is concerned with polarization between ordinary people; however, it is focused on the individual and how it manifests and is exhibited by those engaged in online political discussion. Political scientists usually refer to polarization as ideological, which is the divergence of political opinions or beliefs from those seen to be opposing; or affective which looks to group political identity and the like they feel to those within that group (usually political parties) and animosity to those seen as opposing (see Barberá 2020). I draw on these standard definitions; however, I also look to expand upon these to take into account how polarization is facilitated by not just an affective investment in a political perspective, but also the performance of self. Throughout the book, I refer to fandom of a political perspective or affiliation. All participants in the study were asked to self-nominate their political orientation (options were given as far left, fairly left, slight left of centre, centre, slightly right of centre, fairly right, far right). Options for political orientation replicated those used in the annual global Reuters Institute digital news report (Newman et al. 2020). The phrases political perspective or political affiliation, to describe the object of participants’ affective investment, were chosen to reflect that everyone ascribes differing values and beliefs to the binary of left and right. It is also an attempt to recognise that these categories are ever-changing and culturally specific in their content. As Mason (2018) notes, a political identity does not require values and policy attitudes; it simply requires, a sense of inclusion and exclusion or an “us” and “them”. As Kinder and Kalmoe 2017 further explain that, for some, the terms “liberal” and “conservative” designate who is “us” and who is “them.” It is unlikely, then, that feelings toward liberals and conservatives, or those deemed left of right, are based entirely

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on policy disagreements, therefore I have taken the term political perspective or political affiliation to be that which the individual uses as a marker of their political identity, recognising that the characteristics they attribute to, for example a left perspective, may differ, even in small degrees, to myself or others.

Finding Political Talk Online Like many of the concepts in this study, that of political talk is also contested. As Settle (2018) notes “certain topics are almost universally recognized as pertaining to politics, but a wider set of content can be considered politicized” (18). Empirical studies show that people claim to undertake political discussion in spaces outside those designated as platforms for political discussion. To a certain extent this study has been focused on politically designated spaces as a way of accessing individuals engaged in political talk and specifically polarized political discussion. However, news articles that formed the field of study were varied. They were not always overtly or explicitly political, but they did need to present a news event as opposed to, for example, lifestyle-type content. Due to the ubiquity of social media in our everyday lives, our social, educational, work and political experiences are heavily intertwined. We are using the same spaces for all facets of our lives. They are not distinct, but each overlap and interact with each other. Therefore, a story did not need to be about a particular politician or political party to elicit intense discussion in which political identity became a potent factor. I did, however, determine that a news event in which facts are reported and therefore open to interpretation and discussion were much more likely to produce the polarized discussion that I wanted to examine in this research. Political talk, therefore, is determined as anything around which individual and group life is impacted—a necessarily broad definition—that suggests that all ‘talk’ is in some way political. I also draw on Berlant’s (2008) notion of the intimate public, in which emotion and personal life can in fact enact a public life whereby strangers can consume similar texts and conceive of shared feelings and togetherness. The public is made intimate as individuals recognise themselves in the texts, and knowledge sharing develops in these spaces which in turn provides a promise of belonging (Berlant 2008, p. ix). Most of the research examining online discussion is framed within the ideals of the Habermasian public sphere (1991), where rationality is the epitome of the participation. However, when measuring these deliberative aspects in online commenting forums, research overwhelmingly finds them either rare or

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non-­existent (Chen 2017; Coe et al. 2014; Muddiman and Stroud 2017; Hsueh et al. 2015). However, if we understand the power of the personal and emotionality in forming a collective (even if imagined), we cannot view these interactions purely through a deliberative lens. I attempt to tackle this important contemporary issue and address the limitations in previous approaches by using fan theory.

Why Fan Studies? For many, fan studies may seem like a strange approach to political polarization. Traditionally, of course, fandom is associated with texts of popular culture, celebrities, and sporting teams. However, there is an increasing number of scholars that are applying the framework of fans studies outside of its traditional realm and increasingly to the political and politics (see Chap. 3 for an overview). These scholars build from Sandvoss’ (2005) assertion that it is not the object of fandom that makes the fan, but rather the committed consumption of the fan text. He further articulates that “fandom seems to have become a common and ordinary aspect of everyday life … [and] our fan consumption thus becomes a generally understood language through which one’s identity is communicated and assessed” (2005, 3). Drawing on this expansion of the understanding of the fan, I examine engagement in online political discussion through the lens of fan-like behaviours, specifically the affective investment in a political perspective and the related identity performance, both on the individual level and collectively. My participants don’t necessarily self-nominate as fans of a particular political perspective, but I examine their behaviours using a fan studies interpretative lens. Examined in this way, polarized discussion is the result of behaving as a ‘fan’ of, for example, a ‘left-wing’ or ‘right-wing’ political perspective. Seen through a fan theoretical lens, reactions to a story on climate change or immigration, for example, can be understood as a performance of political identity. Similarly, the escalation of antagonism to commenters of opposing perspectives can be understood as a process of ‘othering’ necessary to develop and sustain a collective identity. Seen as a function of fan-based reactions, discussion about political issues becomes less about facts and evidence and more about affective reactions to a perceived threat to collective and individual identity. When referring to affect, I understand this term in line with Papacharissi’s (2016) definition, that it is the intensity of emotion. This is further articulated within fan studies, where affect is usually understood as embodied

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meaning making (Grossberg 1992). Emotion, however, is distinct in that it can be mediated and “may become public and collective through naming, articulation and circulation” (Wahl-Jorgensen 2019, 8). An affective practice (Wetherell 2012) is, therefore, an act that is the result of an intense emotional reaction. Put simply, the leaving of a comment in an online political discussion is an affective practice. The comment is produced because of the emotion elicited from reading the news article or the comments of others. That emotion can vary widely, from anger to joy and a myriad of other emotions.

Anti-fandom and the Study of Dislike The emotions of dislike, distrust and even hate are words that are commonly associated with polarization. Again, fan studies offers much to examining the role of these emotions in online political discussion. The study of anti-fandom has focused attention on what Gray (2003) terms the anti-fan or those “who strongly dislike a given text or genre, considering it inane, stupid, morally bankrupt and/or aesthetic drivel” (70). Sandvoss (2019) argues it is the politics of against the other, or opposing side, which activates participatory politics. Given the role of othering in polarization, anti-fandom provides a significant intervention in how individuals experience and exhibit polarization (anti-fandom is outlined in detail in Chap. 3). Further, it’s Gray’s (2021) extension of the anti-fan theory thesis to the dislike-minded audience, which helps situate this study. Emma Jane (2014, 2019) argues  that anti-fandom can work to excuse hate or extremism. Gray (2021), therefore, seeks to distinguish the dislike-minded audience from the hate which underlies online harassment and hate speech. He argues for an understanding of “engaged dislike”, which might be expressed colloquially as hate, but is more than disinterest or mere annoyance. It has a degree of passion, but equally does not seek actual harm of the disliked object. Of course, a person who may state a particular political affiliation within a discussion may become a representative of a feared or loathed group (e.g. those on the left to someone who performs a right political identity) and will therefore be subjected to the dislike and even hatred that results from this association. But like Gray, I am not attempting to excuse or gloss over the hate speech found online and its very real consequences by taking a fan studies and anti-fandom approach. But, rather, using these interpretative frameworks helps to move

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the investigation of participation in online political discussion away from traditional approaches, which, as outlined above, focus on deliberation and participatory politics as separate from everyday life. In the almost three years I spent actively observing the comment threads of news organisations, I did see some examples of those involved in the discussion expressing true hate in terms of a stated wish for someone else to be met with physical harm or trauma—but these were not as common as you might think. They stood out because, while I focused in on discussions that showed evidence of polarization and often antagonism, these examples were not the norm. This, of course, could be due to moderation, and it must be noted that uncivil and antagonistic comments directed at others can in fact cause trauma, regardless of the intention. Gray (2021, 8) notes that “distinctions between hate and dislike are not always so easy to disarticulate” and true hatred may begin as dislike. But this is precisely why it is so important to examine these comments in a way that does not excuse or endorse them but seeks to find ways to stop these articulations in the first place. This study seeks to do that in a small way by looking at discussions that may begin with incivility and antagonism and understand how people may have got there and then using this knowledge inform how we might intervene. Without truly understanding why people behave the way they do online, we won’t be able to reshape these spaces so that they are inclusive and productive. This is not a book about hate speech or extremism (although I do discuss how my findings may inform further investigation in that space in the conclusion, Chap. 7). I, therefore, distinguish the behaviours I observed drawing from Chen’s (2017) insightful definitions in which incivility is not the expression of a counter view or a strident debate. It is based on the characteristics of the message and can include rudeness and veer into name calling, and use of stereotypes. It can veer into hate speech in that it can cause harm, even if that is not the intention. As Chen (2017) argues, agreement and silence are innocuous, but do little to move debate, while on the other end of the spectrum hate speech or trolling (the intentional effort to get a rise out of people and harm them) preclude deliberation. Under this conceptualisation, emotionled engagement spans both productive and non-productive discussion. Therefore, to move beyond a quality/low-quality dichotomy, we must consider the ways in which emotion informs particular acts of online participation and expression.

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Why Facebook? The focus of this book is Facebook and the political discussion that is housed there. Tucker et al. (2018) in their review of literature on social media, polarization and disinformation, find that overwhelmingly studies focus on Twitter. Twitter data, they argue, is more easily accessible in its terms of use, which no doubt has led to this skew in scholarly research. However, it is not the most popular social media platform globally; that distinction belongs to Facebook. As they note: “if we want a better understanding of how social media usage is affecting U.S. politics along all the lines discussed in this report, analysis of the effects of Facebook usage needs to play a larger role in scientific studies” (60). For the Australian component of this study, it was undertaken at a unique period in time—prior to Australian media organisations being held liable for content posted following news articles shared on Facebook. In September 2021, the Australian High Court ruled that media outlets that post articles on social media are liable for third-party defamatory comments (Byrne 2021). Therefore, this examination of the vibrant, dynamic and, yes, often uncivil discussion that followed news articles shared on Facebook by Australian media organisations can most likely not be replicated. At the time of writing, it was still unclear exactly how the news organisations would deal with this change, but it was assumed that they would close comments or undertake more heavy-handed moderation. As argued in this book, this represents a great loss for Australian democracy. In this investigation of the manifestation of polarization in these spaces, I found highly engaged individuals who used their participation in these discussions to engage politically. It suggests a loss for driving that level of investment towards political motivation and interest.

Where to from Here? In the following chapters I outline my fan-studies-informed investigation into the manifestation of polarization in online political discussion. In Chap. 2, I outline the problems with existing theoretical approaches to polarization in online discussion. I argue for the need to view polarization online beyond a problem caused by technological affordances and examine it holistically as an affective practice. The chapter concludes by arguing for a conceptualisation of polarization that moves away from viewing this phenomenon as a difference between the policy positions of political

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parties or even purely an intense dislike of the opposing side. I argue for moving beyond the frame of rational deliberative discussion when examining online political discussion common on social media platforms and instead advocate for understanding polarization as an affective positioning, which informs online commenting behaviour through its role in identity performance. I ultimately argue that it is this method of understanding polarization that is more effective for examining its pervasiveness in the interactions of citizens on social media platforms such as Facebook, the central focus of this book. In Chap. 3, I outline the utility of fan studies for examining online political discussion, in particular how fan-like behaviours may help explain polarization. I examine fandom; what constitutes a fan and fan community; and the behaviours that are associated with fandom. It examines the intersection of fandom and politics and how we might extend this scholarship to online political discussion and specifically the manifestation of polarization in those discussions. The chapter concludes by examining anti-fandom as a productive activity that is driven by feelings of dislike and hatred, outlining how this can manifest in fan practices and performances that are informed by the articulation of differences and hostilities to those representing an opposing political perspective. Ultimately, I argue that fan studies pushes to the forefront of inquiry a focus on the role affect plays in the processing, sharing and debating of information, which has more to do with these complex relationships with the fan object and anti-fan object than truth or facts. In Chap. 4, I draw on interviews with Australian online commenters who participated in polarized discussion following news stories shared on social media and survey results from online commenters in Australia and the United States. I outline the key ways that fan-like behaviours, and even fandom for a political perspective, and anti-fandom for an opposing political perspective, fuel polarization in online political discussion. Specifically, I argue how the role of individual and collective identity performance, entertainment and affective investment drive commenting behaviours that initiate and sustain polarized online political discussion. Ultimately, I argue that evaluating online political discussion within a Habermasian (1991) frame provides little hope in understanding the full gamut of factors driving interactions following news stories shared on social media. If deliberation reaching consensus is the ultimate goal of political discussion, then the analysis outlined in this chapter suggests that there is little hope of this. Interaction is not always rational or based on fact, but rather, in

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one way or another, a performance of self, or the self that users think they should be. Defence of identity is a powerful motivator and can serve to entrench beliefs and opinions, rather than make an individual open to deliberation. In Chap. 5, I examine a closed Facebook Group focused on US political discussion. The group’s self-proclaimed aim is to bring people from opposing political perspectives together to ‘intelligently’ debate issues and, as such, is fertile ground for examining the behaviour and motivations of those involved in online political discussion. I outline measures used by the group to create this environment, and moments of success in this lofty goal, along with the failures. Findings suggest that even in a space designed to illicit intelligent and quality debate, fan-like behaviours continue to initiate and sustain polarized debate. Given that the group is dedicated to bringing those with differing political opinions together, this case study allows for the examination of the motivations and behaviours of a community which claims to want to have civil and productive political debate. Ultimately, I will argue that while technological affordances and moderation practices can influence online political discussion, it is the fan-­ like attachments to political perspectives that shape participation in political debate. In Chap. 6, I draw on the theoretical framework of fandom to examine the evaluation of information used in online political debate as well as the use of the fake news label. Drawing on the interview and survey data, I argue that the phenomenon of fake news has a role in polarization in two important ways: If we understand an individual’s investment in their political identity as fan-like, then that affective investment informs how they interpret the information they find and share. Secondly, the use of the fake news label is a discursive tactic of performance in online political discussion to distinguish from and malign the perceived other. In the final chapter, Chap. 7, I conclude the book by examining the implications of investigating the manifestation of polarization in online political discussion using a fan studies interpretative lens. I discuss how understanding the role of fandom of a political perspective in identity performance and how this informs engagement in participatory politics offers valuable lessons for tackling political disillusionment. I also examine how the results of this study can inform further investigations of political extremism and the spread of disinformation in the form of conspiracy theories.

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Finally, you will find a Methods Appendix, which is my attempt to outline my research design, and, in particular, how it evolved given the particular challenges associated with examining online political discussion. While this is a comprehensive overview of my research process, including my methods of observation, interviews, and survey responses, I have included brief overviews of the data collected in each chapter in which it informs the results (recognising that most often academic books are not read from beginning to end). Together, I hope that the chapters that constitute Fandom and Polarization in Online Political Discussion: From Pop Culture to Politics provide an insightful intervention into the contemporary issue of polarization. It represents, what I hope is, an emerging field of study that applies the tenets of fandom beyond its usual associations with objects of popular culture.

References Barberá, Pablo. 2020. Social Media, Echo Chambers, and Political Polarization. Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field, Prospects for Reform 34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berlant, Lauren. 2008. The Female Complaint. Duke University Press. https:// doi.org/10.1515/9780822389163/HTML. Byrne, Elizabeth. 2021. High Court Finds Media Outlets Are Responsible for Facebook Comments in Dylan Voller Defamation Case. ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-­0 9-­0 8/high-­c ourt-­r ules-­o n-­m edia-­ responsibility-­over-­facebook-­comments/100442626. Chen, G.M. 2017. Online Incivility and Public Debate: Nasty Talk. Springer International Publishing. Coe, Kevin, Kate Kenski, and Stephen A.  Rains. 2014. Online and Uncivil? Patterns and Determinants of Incivility in Newspaper Website Comments. Journal of Communication 64 (4): 658–679. Gray, Jonathan. 2003. New Audiences, New Textualities Anti-Fans and Non-Fans. International Journal of Cultural Studies 6 (1): 64–81. Gray, Johnathon. 2021. Dislike-Minded: Media, Audiences, and the Dynamics of Taste. New York University Press. Grossberg, Lawrence. 1992. The Affective Sensibility of Fandom. In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis, 60–65. London: Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203181539. Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: MIT press.

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Hsueh, Mark, Kumar Yogeeswaran, and Sanna Malinen. 2015. ‘Leave Your Comment Below’: Can Biased Online Comments Influence Our Own Prejudicial Attitudes and Behaviors? Human Communication Research 41 (4). Hoboken, USA: Wiley Subscription Services, Inc: 557–576. https://doi. org/10.1111/hcre.12059. Jane, Emma A. 2014. Beyond Antifandom: Cheerleading, Textual Hate and New Media Ethics. International Journal of Cultural Studies 17 (2): 175–190. ———. 2019. Hating 3.0: Should Anti-Fan Studies Be Renewed for Another Season? In Anti-Fandom: Dislike, Hate, and Anti-Fandom in the Digital Age, ed. Melissa A. Click, 62–80. New York: NYU Press. Kinder, Donald R., and Nathan P. Kalmoe. 2017. Neither Liberal nor Conservative. University of Chicago Press. Kubin, Emily, and Christian von Sikorski. 2021. The Role of (Social) Media in Political Polarization: A Systematic Review. Annals of the International Communication Association 45 (3): 188–206. https://doi.org/10.108 0/23808985.2021.1976070. Mason, Lilliana. 2018. Ideologues without Issues: The Polarizing Consequences of Ideological Identities. Public Opinion Quarterly 82 (S1): 866–887. https:// doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfy005. Muddiman, Ashley, and Natalie Jomini Stroud. 2017. News Values, Cognitive Biases, and Partisan Incivility in Comment Sections. Journal of Communication 67 (4): 586–609. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12312. Newman, Nic, Richard Fletcher, Anne Schulz, Simge Andi, Craig T. Roberston, and Rasmus K. Nielsen. 2020. Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2020. Papacharissi, Zizi. 2016. Affective Publics and Structures of Storytelling: Sentiment, Events and Mediality. Information, Communication & Society 19 (3): 307–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2015.1109697. Sandvoss, Cornel. 2005. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2019. The Politics of Against: Political Participation, Anti-Fandom, and Populism. In Dislike, Hate, and Anti-Fandom in the Digital Age, ed. Melissa A. Click, 125–146. New York: NYU Press. Settle, Jaime E. 2018. Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America. Cambridge University Press. Tucker, Joshua A, Andrew Guess, Pablo Barberá, Cristian Vaccari, Alexandra Siegel, Sergey Sanovich, Denis Stukal, and Brendan Nyhan. 2018. Social Media, Political Polarization, and Political Disinformation: A Review of the Scientific Literature. Political Polarization, and Political Disinformation: A Review of the Scientific Literature, March 19. Wahl-Jorgensen, Karin. 2019. Emotions. Media and Politics: John Wiley & Sons. Wetherell, Margaret. 2012. Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

CHAPTER 2

Getting Down in the Muck: Polarization and Online Debate

Introduction It is impossible to canvas political discussion without reference to the deep fractures and fissions apparent in everyday political discourse. This political polarization has been pronounced as one of the greatest issues of modern times by scholars, politicians and media pundits alike. For example, as former US president Barack Obama declared in an interview after leaving office: “our politics is so polarized right now. I think it’s a solvable problem, but I think it’s one we have to spend a lot of time thinking about” (cited in Chandran 2018, n.p.). Often this concern is interwoven with the role that social media has in undermining democracy (Tucker et al. 2018), enhancing extreme partisanship and the spread of misinformation to support those extremes. Again, Obama referred to this connection in the same interview when he stated: “if you are getting all your information off algorithms being sent through your phone and it’s just reinforcing whatever biases you have, which is the pattern that develops, at a certain point, you just live in a bubble” (cited in Chandran 2018, n.p.). The narrative, outlined by Obama, and prevalent in both academia and popular culture holds that social media is responsible for the amplification of extremist ideas and the division of individuals on partisan lines. This political polarization is traditionally framed as “ideological polarization, or the distance between the parties on a left-right scale in terms of their © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Barnes, Fandom and Polarization in Online Political Discussion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14039-6_2

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policy preferences” (Tucker et al. 2018, 49). It is then extrapolated that this elite polarization increases mass polarization (see, e.g., Levendusky 2013; Stroud 2011) creating a deeply entrenched and ongoing issue for democracy. To investigate the utility of this conception, this chapter will canvas the literature of polarization. It will relate it to the investigation of online political discussion and how we might understand the advent of polarization in these discussions. It will argue for a move away from the frame of rational deliberative discussion and instead advocate for understanding polarization as an affective positioning, which informs online commenting behaviour through its role in identity performance. It will argue that it is this method of understanding polarization that is more effective for examining its pervasiveness in the interactions of citizens on social media platforms such as Facebook, the central focus of this book.

Moving Beyond Ideological Polarization Traditionally polarization has been viewed as ideological or a divergence of political views (Barberá 2020). However, political scientists have increasingly seen the limitations of this definition, particularly in the contemporary digital media environment. As a result, a number of alternative ways to conceptualise polarization have emerged. Talisse (2019) outlines the three ways that political scientists have measured political distance including both ideological and affective polarization. The first looks at policies and the distance between these positions. The second is concerned with ideological homogeneity and how extreme or moderate party members may be. The third is not concerned with the political parties themselves, but rather the emotions of ordinary people who may affiliate with a political party or at least a political position and in particular their dislike of those seen to represent opposing views. As Barberá (2020) notes in a review of the literature on social media and polarization: it is important to consider how we define political polarization—do we mean just divergence in political views or issue positions (ideological polarization) or dislike for the partisan outgroup (affective polarization) (11)

Often a method of examining the manifestation of polarization has been through partisan cues, group cues and emotion cues (Tucker et al.

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2018). Partisan cues come from politicians, and news coverage of politics, and it is a prevailing consensus within political communication research that this elite behaviour, and the reportage of it, helps increase political polarization. As Klar (2014, 688) notes, the “absence or presence of partisan cues tends to determine the degree to which individuals engage in accuracy-driven or directional motivated reasoning.” Partisan cues are said then to result in individuals blindly supporting positions endorsed by their preferred party, even if this is not compatible ideologically (Lavine et al. 2012). Studies examine how partisan cues help present politics as a struggle between irreconcilable opposing sides, particularly in partisan media. Consumption of these cues make audiences’ partisan identities more salient and contributes to entrenched polarization (see, e.g., Levendusky 2013; Stroud 2011). These polarizing effects can also be created through mainstream media who report on polarizing comments and positions of political elites (Arceneaux and Johnson 2015). However, it has been argued that in this case “party elites may bear more of the responsibility” for entrenched polarization, and news media, both partisan and mainstream, are merely “megaphones more than motivators of partisan polari­ zation” (Arceneaux and Johnson 2015, 322–323). The concept of group cues, draws on social identity theory, and refers to the way in which negative attitudes towards those deemed to be “other” are an important component of polarization. This way to examine polarization is  based on Tajfel’s (1978) work on intergroup relations. Tajfel suggests that we will create positive impressions of our in-group, which in a political sense may be related to a party, but also a political perspective (e.g. left-wing or right-wing or liberal or conservative), while reinforcing negative stereotypes of those deemed to represent the out-­group; in a political sense the opposing party or perspective. Further, partisan leaders will not only influence an in-group, but also the out-group. For example, as Nicholson (2012) finds, Obama did not influence Democrats to support his policy positions, but rather had a great impact on forcing Republicans to take the opposing position. The impacts of this “us” and “them” distinction extends to making individuals more likely to believe false or misleading information about the out-group (Kosloff et al. 2010). This is a significant finding that needs to be explored as it relates to ordinary citizens and how they behave in political discussion. Does a lack of consensus and increased polarization in online political discussion relate to

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defence of one’s political perspective or is it a result of reacting against the opposing view? In the following chapters, this book explores this concept as a method for understanding polarized discussion. Emotional cues are like group cues in that they are a form of social identity enactment. The emotions that an individual feels when exposed to information (particularly those that contain partisan cues) will influence how they use that information (Tucker et al. 2018). Anger, for example, has been found to encourage partisan-motivated evaluation of information to reaffirm social identity. While anxiety can cause accuracy-driven motivations when evaluating information (Weeks 2015). Talisse (2019) asks scholars to use these cues in the context of identity performance when understanding polarization as it relates to an individual’s behaviour. In his book Overdoing democracy: Why we must put politics in its place (2019) he states that our understanding of polarization is limited. At its core, polarization isn’t about how politicians or political parties are divided—it’s about how the political identity of ordinary people is entangled with all aspects of their lives. Approaching an understanding of polarization in this manner, when examining its manifestations in online discussion (as this book intends to do), is valuable. Instead of focusing on how polarization is reflected in the behaviour of elites, it shifts the focus to how individuals will enact their own defined political perspective in online interactions. This refocus asks us to consider political polarization as being about feelings rather than facts.

Affective Polarization Affective polarization is another prominent conceptualisation of polarization. This notion is based on the premise that partisanship is a potent factor of social identity construction and performance, driving hostility towards those deemed to represent the opposing political perspective (Iyengar et al. 2019). This is a particularly powerful form of social identity as partisanship remains stable, rarely shifting over time (Campbell et  al. 1960). This definition of polarization draws heavily on social identity theory and asserts that partisanship is driven by in-group association and an intense dislike of the out-group. An individual’s measures to differentiate themselves from the defined out-group, are a potent form of social identity performance ingraining a political perspective, rather than judgment of policy positions. As Achen and Bartels (2016, 228) note “identities are not primarily about adherence to a group ideology or creed. They are

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emotional attachments that transcend thinking.” However, an identity based on partisanship is not enough to explain out-group animosity. A process of partisan sorting, or the way in which people will align partisan identities with ideologically consistent issue positions contributes to partisan animosity (Druckman et al. 2021; Lelkes 2018). Partisan sorting has manifested through the sorting of liberals to the Democratic Party and conservatives to the Republican Party, in the United States (Levendusky 2009) as well as social sorting that produces demographically uniform parties (Mason 2018a). Affective polarization is linked to biased information processing, which is an essential part of this process, whereby it is the perceived social distance between perspectives which drives evaluation (Barberá 2020; Mason 2018b; Settle 2018), creating a polarizing feedback loop. Likewise, uncivil messages can reduce the legitimacy of the out-group when directed at them, but not one’s in-group arguments (Mutz 2007). Factors, then, such as partisan social identity performance and in-group association are important aspects to consider when examining polarized online political discussion. Settle (2018) argues that contemporary politics is characterised by a form of polarization (which she terms psychological polarization) that is two pronged—affective—in that each side has increasing negative feelings for the other, but also perceived as they perceive a great distance between political parties and their adherents. The combination of affective and perceived polarization is that individuals will emotionally evaluate parties and political perspectives, while also exaggerating party or perspective difference for reasons related to identity affirmation. Conceptualising polarization as affective has an enormous benefit when examining interaction in online political discussion. It moves away from examining political discussion as that which is related to ideas or policy and instead focuses on the individual and the role of politics. It repositions examination of partisanship as not distinct or disconnected from other components of social identity. Instead, it suggests that if we extend this understanding of affective polarization, we can examine how it manifests in online discussion as part of a performance of self. A political perspective is performed as other elements of social identity are performed, and politics is viewed and interpreted in line with other social factors that are traditionally recognised on social media.

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Populism and Affective Polarization For Schulze et al. (2020), intrinsically linked to a rise in polarization is a rise of populism. In discussing the liberal democracies of Europe, they outline that “populist parties advocating extreme policy positions and, at the same time, nourishing distrust toward traditional parties and media, both parties and voters have become increasingly polarized” (2020, 1). However, the term populism itself is conceptualised in many ways, with it described as a discourse (Laclau 1977; Stavrakakis and Katsambekis 2014), an ideology (Mudde 2004), as a form of rhetoric (Bonikowski and Gidron 2016), a type of political style (Moffitt 2017) and even a discursive frame (Aslanidis 2016). Mudde and Kaltwasser (2018) attempt to draw together these differing ways of understanding populism by examining it as an ideation. In this way, populism is then defined as a set of ideas that asks us to view society as divided between “the pure people” versus “the evil or corrupt elite.” It also asks that we believe claims that politics is about respecting popular sovereignty under all circumstances. This definition is drawn from Mudde’s (2004) original, and perhaps the most used, definition which views populism as a “thin-centred ideology”, or a belief system with a limited range (Freeden 2003), whereby populism is linked to other ideological elements, which are crucial for appealing to a broader public. Engesser et al.’s (2017) examination of populism on social media suggests similar key elements of populism: emphasising the sovereignty of the people, advocating for the people, attacking the elite, ostracising others. They also added a key element of invoking the “heartland” or an “idealised conception of the community” (Taggart 2004, 274). We argue that a politician who uses these five ideological key elements engages in an illocutionary act of populism and, in this way, becomes a populist actor. In concrete terms, populist communication manifests itself by emphasizing the sovereignty to the people, advocating for the people, attacking elites, ostracizing others, and invoking the heartland. (Engesser et al. 2017, 1111)

While these conceptions of populism work to bring a vast scope of literature together, they do exclude those that view it as a strategy or sociocultural approach. For example, Weyland (2017) emphasises that populism is a strategy through which a charismatic leader seeks

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government power to mobilise large numbers of supporters. Likewise, Betz (2002) states that “populism is primarily a political strategy, whose political rhetoric is the evocation of latent grievances and the appeal to emotions provoked by them, rather than an ideology” (198). Ostiguy (2017) further argues that populism is based on leaders behaving inappropriately or breaking taboos that are associated with elites to build a connection with voters. However, Mudde and Kaltwasser (2018) argue that by taking an ideational approach it ensures that populism is not linked to any aspects of economic or sociocultural facets of a particular region or society. It is adapted to suit the needs of the specific political project that it is enacted to promote. Understanding populism is particularly important when examining online political discussion as it manifests as a form of communication. Here the analogy of supply and demand can be employed to understand the communicative aspects of populism. Supply becomes the aspects such as the elite actor’s communication of proposed populist ideas, while the demand side is concerned with the societal and individual factors that contribute to the success of it as a discursive strategy. The supply of populism is based on Tajfel & Turner’s (1979) social identity theory as outlined above, where the in-group is determined as ordinary people and the out-­ group as elites or others, such as refugees, who are framed as a threat. For example, Trump’s victory using an anti-elitist and collectivist rhetoric to mobilise voters (Oliver and Rahn 2016) can be explained as a form of supply. On the demand side, socioeconomic discontent and perceived political corruption, both of which are amplified by the media can drive support for populism (Mudde 2004; Spruyt et al. 2016). Others examine the role of emotions, such as whether feelings of anger or fear can be used to explain support for populist parties (Van Hauwaert and Van Kessel 2018). By examining populism as a supply and demand proposition, it provides a focus on the production of communication and the reception of it. This is a useful frame for the examination of political discussion and how polarization manifests in these discussions online. Given that populists (re)politicize certain issues that the establishment, deliberately or not, has overlooked, and do so in essentially moral terms, they polarize the political system by mobilizing segments of the electorate that are angry with the current state of affairs against the ‘corrupt’ elite. (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2018, 1682)

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Equally, however, an opposing or mainstream political party can increase polarization by mobilising an ‘anti-populist’ discourse that draws on a moral and homogenising frame (Stavrakakis 2014). Here we see an attempted mobilisation of partisanship, either by the populist protagonist or those opposing, which is “an affective attachment to an important group object in the environment” (Campbell et al. 1960, 143). This affective attachment can be positive or negative. They can be mobilising either through an emotional attachment that is positive to a particular person or party, or because of a repulsion of a particular person or party. This negative partisanship could mean that an individual votes for, or takes a particular position within, a debate or discussion that represents a specific party or position not because they have a strong positive feelings for that party, but rather because they hate the alternative. As outlined here, much of the research into the advent of populism focuses on specific parties or individuals. However, Mason (2018b) argues we should separate issue-based and identity-based elements of ideology and instead examine the performed social distance between those who call themselves liberals and conservatives. This is because identity formation and performance does not require values and policy attitudes; it simply requires an “us” and a “them” or, as Brewer (2001) suggests, a sense of exclusion. As Kinder and Kalmoe (2017) argue, self-identification as “liberal” and “conservative” may be used to assign who is “us” and who is “them.” Populist leaders can work to activate this binary, but so too can sustained performance that is linked with populist rhetoric by ordinary citizens in online political discussion. Juarez Miro (2021) describes the social gratifications experienced by supporters in their engagement with populist messages in online discussion, pointing to a need to understand populism and its associated polarization within a wider perspective than ideology, policy and rhetoric. Papacharissi (2018, 2021) takes this further by suggesting that the search for a truth, or a claim to one truth, in populist political culture is ultimately a search for belonging. The distinction of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and the struggle for the ownership of one truth can, therefore, be understood as something that activates affective practice in online political discussion. We must then find ways for interpreting these behaviours that move beyond the need for successful consensus. As such, the study of populism offers much to examining how individuals behave in online political discussion and how this behaviour can result in deep-rooted polarization. Populism is been fuelled by emotional appeals to disenchanted citizens (Wahl-Jorgensen 2019), entrenching an “us” and

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“them”. Therefore, when the self is performed in online political discussion, the rigidity of our categorisation will drive animosity, partisanship and, ultimately, polarization. We must then understand the emotional appeal that drives this performance.

Political Fragmentation Through Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles Intertwined with academic examination of polarization has been a focus on what is described as the political fragmentation thesis: “the idea that online conversations about politics are typically divided into a variety of groups, and that this division takes place along ideological lines with people only talking to those who are ideologically similar” (Bright 2018, 17). This homophily, or propensity to only form social ties with those of similar viewpoints, will naturally emerge in discussion, or so the argument goes (Barberá 2015; Mcpherson et al. 2001). A closely related argument is that of “selective exposure” (Knobloch-Westerwick 2015) whereby individuals choose to only interact with information that reflects their political standpoint. This phenomenon is also explained as a rise in “echo chambers” (Sunstein 2001) and “filter bubbles” (Pariser 2011) where individuals, either through choice or the technological affordances of social networks, news aggregators and search engines are only exposed to conforming opinions (Knobloch-Westerwick 2015; Mukerjee and Yang 2021; Levy 2021; Stroud 2010; Heatherly et  al. 2016; Iyengar and Hahn 2009). Scholars who have investigated these concepts have argue that they work to reinforce polarization, creating and sustaining the “us” and “them” that have the potential to move individuals to extremes (Warner 2010). There are numerous issues with this approach to investigating online political discussion. In fact, as Bruns (2019) chronicles, empirical evidence suggests that the technological affordances of social media do not insulate homophilous groups from exposure to difference, instead they could enhance access to “cross-cutting” discussion’ or those discussions that involved political disagreements or those that represent the opposing side. Indeed cross-cutting discussion is frequent on social media (Barberá et al. 2015) and exposure to a diverse range news sources is more prevalent than through other media (Silver et  al. 2019; Barnidge 2017). Equally, it has been shown that algorithms don’t have an impact on the

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diversity of news consumed (Bakshy et al. 2015).This could be due to the number of “weak ties” (Granovetter 1973) that social media networks allow an individual exposure to. These weak ties, such as historical acquaintances, co-workers and relatives are, it could be argued, more likely to share ideologically diverse information. However, the results of exposure to cross-cutting discussion are mixed. Some argue that ongoing exposure to cross-cutting discussion could result in more political moderation and tolerance (Mutz 2006); however, other studies suggest increased exposure to cross-cutting views and information may also increase polarization (Bail et  al. 2018; Suhay et  al. 2018; Zhuravskaya et  al. 2020). Bright (2018) finds, in his investigation of Twitter, that groups that sit at the extremes of the ideological scale are unlikely to interact with those on the opposing side, whereas discussion between centralists who sit on different sides of the left–right divide is more common. These left and right centralists are also more likely to interact than centralists and extremists from the same ideological wing. This research, therefore, suggests that while political fragmentation exists, it is not as pervasive as proponents of echo chambers and filter bubbles suggest. By definition, polarized discussion necessitates that two opposing sides (represented by individuals or groups of individuals) cannot reach consensus and often this devolves into antagonism. How then can we begin to understand the manifestation of polarization in online political discussion? Some studies suggest that social media does expose us to a more diverse range of information, suggesting that its impact on polarization may be overstated. However, it is unclear what impact that has on an individual’s attitudes and behaviours. This suggests that we need to look beyond polarization as exposure to and sharing of information and look at the affective elements of online political discussion and their relationship to polarization. Marchal (2022) argues, in her examination of Reddit users’ political discussion, that we must include the affective dimensions of online polarization in our understanding of this phenomenon. She finds that negativity aimed at the opposition in online conversation has the effect of making users opt out from discussion. She also finds that when users make a positive reference to the opposition this has a depolarizing effect, encouraging more positive interaction. It is therefore imperative that we extend our methods for examining online political discussion beyond the rational and deliberative.

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Settle (2018) attempts to grapple with this distinction by focusing on individual behaviours as a way to understand polarization. She argues that a combination of social media usage, specific technological affordances and the type of partisan political content that is shared on Facebook operates to increase the perceived differences between individuals’ own political perspective and that of those they view to be the out-group or those with a differing political perspective. This results in an individual’s political and social identities becoming more entwined and contributes to the stereotyping or negative evaluations of the out-group. Further, this phenomenon can be explained as social media, and Facebook in particular, creating a fusion of social and political content that reinforces an affective reaction to political discussion, suggesting the normative approach of examining polarization within the frame of deliberative democracy and rationality is limiting. It suggests that given the ubiquity of political talk amongst other general conversations and the associated way that this impacts upon an individual’s behaviour is more in line with how we examine the passionate and dedicated engagement of popular culture.

An Emotionally Charged World We can see, then, the dangers of viewing politics as solely rational and not influenced or informed by emotion. For Wahl-Jorgensen (2019) the focus on objectivity, rationality and deliberative ideals renders emotion invisible in the study of political communication, but, as she argues, emotions are inevitable and key components of mediated politics as they play a key role in fostering engagement. The traditional Habermasian focus on the ideal public sphere has been particularly influential because it places news media as central within the deliberation process. Based on the normative ideals of deliberative democracy, most research focuses on the role of political discussion in society and measures this based on the quality of such discussion and follow-on consequences (both on an individual level, such as level of tolerance, and group level, such as civic engagement) (Tucker et al. 2018). Based on this ideal, political discussion is central to democracy and vital for refining one’s views, persuading others and reaching consensus (see, e.g., Mutz 2006). Under these conditions, deliberative discussion requires that a participant use logic, evidence and rational arguments (Papacharissi 2004; Stroud et al. 2015). There are some studies that find  online discussion meets some characteristics of deliberation (Chen 2017; Rowe 2015; Ruiz et al. 2011); however, overwhelmingly research

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finds them to be wanting (Coe et al. 2014; Hsueh et al. 2015; Muddiman and Stroud 2017; Ruiz et al. 2011). Polarization is seen as augmented by these unruly and uncivil online discussions, which are, it is argued, overwhelmingly detrimental to society. Set within the ideals of deliberation, incivility has been the central focus of much research into online discussion, however, even what constitutes incivility is contested. Many focus on naming calling, vulgarity and divisive or pejorative speech (Coe et al. 2014; Massaro and Stryker 2012; Stryker et  al. 2016) as well as misrepresentation or lying (Massaro and Stryker 2012; Sobieraj and Berry 2011; Berry and Sobieraj 2013). An underlying thread across much of this research is a focus on rudeness as a measure incivility (Stryker et  al. 2016); however, as Papacharissi (2004) notes, when used in this fashion it fails to recognise the role of heated robust debate in democratic discussion. Instead, she suggests that incivility is not simply impoliteness but a set of behaviours that “threaten democracy, deny people their personal freedoms, and stereotype social groups” (Papacharissi 2004, 267). In line with this definition is Chen’s (2017, 18) suggestion that incivility cannot “merely be the expression of a counter view, regardless of how uncomfortable people may feel hearing that opinion;” instead she stresses that incivility has the potential to cause harm. This is a particularly important distinction when examining online political discussion given the anonymity afforded by many social media platforms, which can enhance rudeness or more heated discussion (see Barnes 2018). If understood in this way, then we can recognise that emotional speech should not be dismissed as incivility, and healthy debate in fact requires spirited contestation of views (Massaro and Stryker 2012). Drawing on this approach suggests, then, that understanding the emotional or affective aspects of discussion is an important factor when examining how it becomes polarized. If, then, we accept the premise that rational decision-making is not limited by emotion, but instead is linked (Wahl-Jorgensen 2019), participation in mediated politics is fuelled by a range of emotions including both love and hatred, as well as disgust, fear and shame. In this way, emotions are performative and public, and thus publics, are emotive (Ahmed 2014). We must then also accept that it is detrimental to solely focus on the need for rational discussion within the context of the ideal of deliberation necessary for a functioning public sphere (Habermas 1991). How then are we to examine the role of political communication, and particularly polarization?

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Beyond the Ideals of Deliberation and Rational Consensus A Habermasian focus has led to many of the communication dynamics of political discussion, particularly online, to remain unexplored (Freelon 2010). Broadening our understanding of political communication to include avenues for evaluating the role of intense emotional reactions is necessary to understand the contemporary lived experience of citizens. One way to do this is to broaden the concept of Habermas’ public sphere. Drawing on Dahlberg (2001), Freelon (2010, 2015) suggests that all three models—liberal individualist, communitarian and deliberative—of democracy exist in online political discussions. Under the liberal individualist model, communication is primarily one way and would be used by readers to learn where they stand on issues and in some cases refute them. The communitarian model is focused more on developing in-group interaction (so in political discussion those with similar political perspectives) and developing and reinforcing collective identity. The deliberative model fits with that outlined previously, where rational-critical arguments are present on public issues, with a relatively high level of cross-cutting discussion. This model is concerned with putative equality while communicating across lines of difference. As Freelon (2010, 1176) notes, the framework “extends the scope of online political forum research by situating components of deliberation with respect to other relevant concepts usually measured separately.” Likewise, Berlant (2008) argues that we must consider the role of the intimate public, or where personal lives and emotions connect strangers into a feeling of belonging. We must therefore extend our understanding of how we navigate the emergence of a public and, more broadly, our navigation of the political. Political theorist Chantal Mouffe (2009) calls for a more radical reimagining of how we evaluate political discussion. She rejects any articulations of democracy that only value deliberation through rational consensus. Instead, she stresses the benefit of forms of political conflict as an essential and constructive aspect of pluralist democracy. The role of discussion within her articulation of the democratic ideal is to ensure the ‘other’ is not an enemy, but rather an adversary; transforming antagonism to agonism. She argues that we run the risk of not only political apathy, but also deeply entrenched antagonisms if we deny the role of conflict and passion in political discussion (Mouffe 2009, 8).

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Mouffe (2009) asserts that we cannot eradicate the conflictual nature of social life and it is indeed this conflict which is a legitimate and necessary form of expression that different hegemonic political projects need to be properly confronted. She argues, because we fail to recognise the role of conflict, that the “we” and “they” discrimination, or the “us” and “them” groupings outlined above, have then also reframed the struggle between “right” and “left” as a struggle between right and wrong. This framing is responsible for right-wing populism and other forms of extremism. When channels are not available through which conflicts could take an ‘agnostic’ form, those conflicts tend to emerge on the antagonistic mode. Now, when instead of being formulated as political confrontation between ‘adversaries’, the we/they confrontation I visualized as a moral one between good and evil, the opponent can be perceived only as an enemy to be destroyed and this is not conducive to an agonistic treatment. Hence the current emergence of antagonisms which put into question the very parameters of the existing order. (Mouffe 2009, 5)

Mouffe further contends collective identities built on the we/they discrimination need not be overcome, as much of the framing of polarization suggests, but instead need to be constructed in a way that “energises the democratic confrontation” (2009, 6). Therefore, we must resist calls to think beyond left and right and instead recognise the affective dimension of the mobilisation of collective identities. “Democratic politics cannot be limited to establishing compromises among interests or values or to deliberation about the common good; it needs to have real purchase on people’s desires and fantasies” (2009, 6). Mouffe advocates for antagonism to be played out in an agonistic way. She suggests that we can mitigate antagonistic conflicts if we create legitimate channels for dissenting alternative voices to exist and be heard. For Mouffe (2005) the political is an ethos that is centred on antagonism. Therefore, we must redraw the concept of the public sphere as not a place to reach consensus, but as a place for the expression of pluralistic collective passions. This alternative version of the public sphere would encourage identification around differing positions providing the possibility of choosing between real alternatives. Passion and emotion then can be mobilised for democratic outcomes.

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Mouffe’s thesis offers much to framing the investigation of online political discussion. As Karppinen (2007) argues, her approach is employed as a counter-narrative to the dominant Habermasian approach, where it advocates perspectives that take into account emotions, passions and identity. Taking on Mouffe’s approach to political communication advocates against dismissing any interaction that is heated or uncivil, and instead valuing these aspects of an individual’s behaviours and motivations. Drawing on Mouffe’s conception of the political suggests that it is essential to look beyond the frames of rational discourse, inherent in the deliberation framework, to properly understand how individuals engage in, and interact around, political talk. Mouffe’s critique of “liberal rationalism” is that it does not view identities as being inherent rather than relational or constructed. Therefore, what is proposed here is that we consider interaction in online political discussion as a performance or part of the process of constructing the self. This approach also begins to articulate how we might mobilise polarized political discussion for the overall benefit of democracy. Zizi Papacharissi’s (2015a, 2015b) concept of the affective public is a useful construct for moving beyond a rational deliberative focus and expanding our understanding of polarization in political talk online. An affective public is one that is networked and that which comes together or is disbanded through expression of sentiment. It is an extension of boyd’s (2010) conceptualisation of the networked public, as a public that is restructured by the technology (such as social media) that allows for interaction with an imagined collective. Papacharissi (2015b, 2016), in her exploration of movements such as the 2011 Egyptian uprising or the Occupy movement, argues that all movements are affectively mobilised, but each are unique. Some are connective, but don’t necessarily result in collective action. It is ambient affective statements of opinion, fact or a blend of both which power the movements. This conceptualisation has much relevance when understanding online political discussion more broadly. Affective publics are sustained around affective commonalities, or bonds formed around sentiment, and while online political discussion may not always be about collective action (as in the cases Papacharissi investigates) these discussions provide a setting for an individual defending their affectively formed in-group; or a form of an affective public that centres on a political perspective. In this case, the debate or discussion is less about facts and more about emotion. As Papacharissi notes, affective publics won’t have an impact that is

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immediate or directly political or socio-cultural, economic or legal, instead it is mostly symbolic. Although built over time, this symbolic intervention can have a gradual impact, working to change broader societal narratives. Importantly, Papacharissi (2010, 2016) links the concept of the affective public to affective news. Here, she refers to the rhythm and pace of storytelling in news that is instant. Where conversational form, opinion and drama is mixed with fact in the reporting of an unfolding event— breaking news. While this form of news is prevalent on social media, it is enacted across other legacy media before we, the audience or the journalists, have certainty of what the news event will be. By reporting in this way, news is flattened so much that in order to provide the 24/7 news coverage expected, stories are reproduced under the illusion of something new, creating a heightened sense of anxiety for the public. Political talk in comment threads attached to news stories shared on social media, the field of research for this book, therefore becomes fertile ground for the enactment of affective publics. Given that affective news reporting can elicit feelings of anxiety from readers, then joining the discussion in the comment threads attached becomes an affective practice whereby the stimulus of the news article incites the communication that is an attempt to produce that emotion (Wetherell 2012). A feedback loop of increasing emotional reaction or “affective contagion” (Gibbs 2011) can result as each comment elicits feelings of further anxiety or anger prompting further affective commenting. It is imperative then that we expand our toolkit for examining this discussion to understand this affective investment and how it might be fuelling polarization. Overall, a focus solely on deliberation is detrimental to a proper understanding of how polarization manifests in online political discussion. It doesn’t represent the many and varied conversations that social media platforms, such as Facebook, enable (Freelon 2010, 2015) and ultimately could prove detrimental to the democratic project of enhancing political discourse (Mouffe 2005, 2009).

Conclusion As outlined in this chapter, there are limitations to previous work on polarization, particularly when concerned with how it manifests in online political discussion. Empirical research suggests that while political fragmentation exists, it is not as pervasive as proponents of echo chambers and filter bubbles suggest. Yet, further research suggests that contemporary

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political life is more polarized than ever, with opposing sides more passionately immovable in their opinions and support. We must then broaden our approach to examining the issue of polarization. Understanding polarization as something linked to particular political actors, policies, ideologies or specific rhetoric, fails to examine the role of individual behaviours as they relate to the performance of self. The study of populism offers much to understanding how polarization manifests through communication and how this process can operate in an affective feedback loop. I have argued here that in a contemporary digital media environment we need to move beyond a Habermasian frame, which privileges rationality and deliberation. Such a framework only serves to relegate the investigation of polarization in online political discussion as a measure of quality and a lack of consensus. Instead, we must turn our attention to an individual’s identity performance and associated factors of belonging and community. The networked nature of contemporary communication means that there is not a clear distinction between public and private, social and political. We, therefore, need to find ways that allow us to examine individual attitudes and behaviours more in line with our lived experience. Our interactions on social media platforms, like Facebook, blur the boundary between entertainment and politics, suggesting we need more expansive ways to examine how we talk and feel about politics, much as we do with popular culture. Imagine that you are surrounded by fellow fans of your sports team at a match, or perhaps an advance screening of the new Star Wars movie or some other like or passion—when fellow fans shout, you feel an overwhelming affinity and enthusiasm for your team and the other fans, while at the same time an increased antagonism for the opposing team and their supporters. In the next chapter I will argue that this is more an analogy, that political perspectives are such a salient factor of identity that its impacts are similar to those of a fan’s affective investment in their object of fandom.

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CHAPTER 3

Finding the Fan and Anti-fan: Fan Studies as an Interpretative Frame for Political Polarization

Introduction In August 2019, at the height of the election for the next President of the United States, the deep divisions between Republican and Democrat voters were articulated globally. Mainstream media and social media were dominated by opines of unhealable divisions and polarization and the increasing chances of violence. But while the American media, and much of the world, was concerned about the implications of this deeply entrenched political divide, a different fault line was appearing in the United States. In an article titled ‘Two Americas, tuning each other out’, news website Axios reported that the country was not only polarized in their support for Trump or Biden, but also in TV viewership. “The country’s heightening polarization extends even to the television we watch, severing another thread of America’s collective consciousness as it gears up for the 2020 presidential election” (Savitsky 2019, n.p.). Using a breakdown of Google search data, ratings and self-reported ‘favourite’ TV shows, the website argued Republicans, or those states that traditionally vote Republican, were more likely to be fans of WWE Raw, while Democratic states were more likely to be fans of Succession. Each show offers remarkably different content. WWE Raw, in its 26th season at the time, is a dramatised wrestling extravaganza and Succession is a drama about an ultra-rich family running a media conglomerate. The argument presented is obviously not conclusive. Not every person watching these © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Barnes, Fandom and Polarization in Online Political Discussion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14039-6_3

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shows will necessarily vote in line with the majority in their state and, in fact as we now know, not every state voted as they had traditionally. Equally, not everyone watching these shows would necessarily be a fan of the show. But what if we viewed political affiliation as we do preference for items of popular culture like television shows? What if we examined how people engaged with politics like they do media texts? To do so would mean examining their investment in a political perspective as a factor of identity performance, something that we use to distinguish ourselves from others and allow us to feel, or imagine, ourselves as part of a collective of other like-minded people. Viewed in this way, this element of identity would become even more potent when performed in environments such as online political discussion and may perhaps offer ways to understand why these discussions take on the forms that they do. Given the central thesis of this book is examining how fan-like behaviours inform polarized online discussion, this chapter will set out to outline the argument above: that politics and political perspectives can be a powerful form of identity performance and that fan studies can offer much to understanding how it manifests in online political discussion. This chapter will therefore examine fandom; what constitutes a fan and fan community and the behaviours that are associated with fandom. It will examine the intersection of fandom and politics and how we might extend this scholarship to online political discussion and in particular the manifestation of polarization in those discussions.

You Call Yourself a Fan? It is not surprising that what constitutes a fan is heavily contested, as it is a term that has derived meaning from its use outside of academic spheres (Cavicchi 2018). Mainstream media has historically tied the term, fan, to negative stereotypes of social pathology. Fiske (1992, 30) further notes, fans have been “associated with the cultural tastes of subordinated formations of the people, particularly those disempowered by any combination of gender, age, class and race.” They can, therefore, be characterised as subversive and have even been associated with extremism (Cavicchi 2018). Henry Jenkins (1992) offers a significant intervention in this discourse, when he focuses on the productivity of fans as a form of resistance against cultural industries. As Sandvoss et  al. (2017, 3) note, much of the first wave of fan studies, or the “fandom is beautiful” phase, worked as a “purposeful political intervention that set out to defend fan communities

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against their ridicule in the media and by non-fans” (3). Much like the first wave, the second wave of fan studies was concerned with power and resistance but focused on the reproduction of social and cultural hierarchies within fandom (Sandvoss et al. 2017). This wave saw scholars focus not just on objects of fandom and fan practices, but the interpretive communities of fandom who replicated existing social and cultural conditions and, in some cases, broader social inequalities. The third wave has focused on the affective investment between fans and fan objects and has broadened the study beyond popular culture and sporting teams to fields such as political fandom (Groene and Hettinger 2016). Given the advent of digital technologies that provide for a more personalised consumption of media texts (e.g. streaming services) and the more networked and accessible communal ties associated with that consumption (social media), fandom is more visible and accepted (Sandvoss et al. 2017). Fans are still, however, ‘othered’ in that they are distinguished as different (often negatively) from mainstream audiences and communities and even opposed to democratically meaningful publics (see Duffett 2013). Some argue that this othering is part of the appeal of fandom, whereby such othering creates a stronger ‘us’, and the belonging to a community is not just a result of being a fan, but could in fact be a motive (Baym 2000; Radway 1984). Typically, of course, fandom is associated with popular culture, such as television programs (Jenkins 1992; Lancaster 2001; Baym 2000), musicians (e.g. Fiske 1989), movies (e.g. Click et al. 2010), sports teams (e.g. Sandvoss 2013) or even genres such as romance novels (Radway 1984). In these articulations, the fan has several defining factors. They are involved in an intense mode of reception and consumption of the fan object and can interact collectively in their engagement with the object, forming an alternative community. They typically partake in a form of creative and cultural production and can contest meanings produced while advocating for their own expectations of the object. At the very heart of these activities and experiences is the formation of a fan community around the object with which fans are affectively engaged (Hills 2002) and the pleasure derived from engaging with and interpreting the fan object (Ang 1985; Duffett 2013). Sandvoss (2005) has taken this further, in his much-quoted definition of a fan, whereby a fan is not identifiable by the object of fandom, instead by the practices they undertake or the “regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text” (Sandvoss 2005, 8). He

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further articulates that this is “regardless of who its reader is and regardless of the possible implications of this affection” (Sandvoss 2005, 7). Self-­ identification as a fan, is therefore not necessary, it is behaviour that distinguishes a fan as a fan. Others further argue that fan theory applied more broadly provides a perspective on contemporary social, cultural and economic transformations: “Studying fan audiences allows us to explore some of the key mechanisms through which we interact with the mediated world at the heart of our social, political, and cultural realities and identities” (Gray et al. 2007, 10). Therefore, to properly understand how fan studies may illuminate the dynamics of polarization in the online political discussion, the next section will examine the tenets of fandom as they have developed through the waves of fan studies: intense affective engagement; collective meaning-making and appropriation; social interaction and identity performance; and pleasure from consumption and engagement.

Intensity of Affective Engagement Central to engagement for a fan is the way in which a media text can inspire affect (Grossberg 1992; Hills 2002), which is then mobilised to negotiate the level of investment in that text. This, in turn, is core in the fan’s identity formation. As noted in this book’s introduction, I use the concept of affect as the embodiment of emotion or embodied meaning-­ making, where communication can be understood as an attempt to produce or enact an emotion (Wetherell 2012). This approach differs from Silvan Tomkins’ (1995) articulation of affect which argues for a basic set of affects that incorporates shame, interest, surprise, joy, anger, fear, distress and disgust (Sedgwick et al. 1995, 5). Interestingly, the Grossberg (1992) approach to affect, common in its articulation in fandom, draws from similar roots as Thrift’s (2008) non-representation theory. Non-­ representation theory is valuable here as it looks at the role of affect in politics. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s accounts (Deleuze and Guattari 1994) of affect, as Grossberg does, Thrift (2008, 182) defines affect as “intense autonomic bodily reactions” that can partially account for political attitudes rather than solely an alignment with ideology. An affective investment then is central to not only the investment of a fan in their object of fandom, but to an individual in their performance of a  political perspective. Affect is, therefore, an important consideration when examining online political discussion and the investment and emotional intensity that can be evident.

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Fan studies scholars draw on Abercrombie and Longhurst’s (1998) continuum of media audiences to situate the fan and establish a measure of emotional intensity or affective engagement. Using their framework, fans are conceptualised somewhere between media consumption and production. The spectrum of fans is then further refined to: fans, or those who are particularly attached to the fan object within the context of heavy media use; cultists, who are more engaged in communities or with other fans, than fans; and enthusiasts, who are even more organised, activity-­ focussed, and as the name suggests, enthusiastic, than cultists. Under this model, the term fans is associated most closely with ordinary consumers of media. They don’t tend to make connections with fellow fans and may engage with multiple media sources. These are fans in a broad sense without specific focus and dedication. Cultists will engage in some degree of social interaction or connection around the fan object and be more specific in their attachment and consumption of media related to that fan object. The final category, enthusiasts, are theorised as a highly socially connected group who are keenly focused and attached to the fan object through textual productivity related to it. Drawing on Fiske’s (1989) spectrum of productivity, which spans semiotic productivity (meaning construction through reading), to enunciative productivity (any form or interaction about the fan object) and textual productivity (the creation of a text that is related to the fan object), Sandvoss (2013) argues for a far greater capture for the term fan. Sandvoss (2013) argues that bloggers on the progressive blog site Daily Kos are political enthusiasts, and further categorises fan-like behaviours as they relate to this site. Relating this to the users of Daily Kos, he argues: Ordinary fans are likely to be only semiotically active, i.e. visit Daily Kos without posting on the site, the in-between group of fans will visit the site more regularly and also be enunciatively active by (regularly) commenting on other users’ blogs and the most enthusiastic fans will be those to whom the focal point of their fandom shifts to their own textual activity and who are frequent bloggers themselves. (Sandvoss 2013)

As Sandvoss (2013) further asserts, casual fans, or those who are not the most visible due to a lack of productivity, are by far the largest group. These fans, however, who I have previously described as “engaged listeners” when examining news commenters, are still affectively engaged

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with the object of their fandom. These individuals still have an affective attachment to the text and those they imagine in the community surrounding that text by “lurking” and consuming the text and comment threads (Barnes 2014). So, while a key component of some fans’ behaviour is productivity, one can still be a fan without productivity if there is still some affective engagement. Abercrombie and Longurst’s (1998) typology and Sandvoss’ (2013) further articulation of the fan continuum can be used to interpret varying levels of intensity and commitment from a political perspective. Applying this continuum to online political discussion offers much to understanding engagement. An ordinary fan of a political perspective will have fan-­ like reactions to reading a polarized discussion, these will be emotive and drive their media consumption. Those taking part in these discussions through commenting by defending a political party or position and other methods of textual productivity (creation of memes mocking those of the opposing political perspective or key figures in the other political party, for example) could be deemed cultists. Enthusiasts in these discussions might be identified by organising supporters through co-ordinated issues-based hashtags such as the traditionally right-wing conservative hashtag #climatehoax or those who create communities for commentary such as the meme-based community The Simpsons against the Liberals Facebook page (Barnes and Middlemost 2021).

Pleasure from Consumption, Collective Meaning-­Making and Appropriation At the heart of the fan experience is pleasure. Whether that be through consuming content related to the object of fandom, connecting with others about the object or creating artefacts that relate to the object, fans are driven by an active pursuit of pleasure. However, as Duffett (2013, 279) notes “since fans can be critical, they are in love with the pleasures that they discover, not necessarily with objects themselves” (279). Here, Duffett is arguing that fans can take oppositional reading positions of the texts that they are consuming, but pleasure is still derived from this reading of the text, therefore pleasure forms a central part of the fan experience. Likewise, Fiske (1992) articulates that the pleasure of meaning-making is what drives the fan through varying levels of consumption and productivity.

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All popular audiences engage in varying degrees of semiotic productivity, producing meanings and pleasures that pertain to their social situation out of the products of the cultural industries. But fans often turn this semiotic productivity into some form of textual production that can circulate among—and thus help define—the fan community. (Fiske 1992, 30)

It is this connection between pleasure, meaning-making and productivity that underlies Henry Jenkins’ (1992) seminal text Textual Poachers, which positions fans as resistant readers that appropriate the fan text and rework it, circulating this “poached” content within a like-minded community. In this articulation, the focus is not on the individual’s investment in the text, but rather the process of collective meaning-making. It is only through collectivity that the essentially powerless fan can push back and resist powerful cultural industries, harnessing the power of digital media to reinterpret the fandom object and advocate for their desired outcomes. However, for Matt Hills (2002), individual investment and community formation are not at odds: “Personalized, individual and subjective moments of fan attachment interact with communal constructions and justifications without either moment over-writing or surmounting the other” (Hills 2002, xiii). As Baym’s (2000) study of soap opera fans and Radway’s (1984) study of fans of romance novels find, the individualised or personal fulfilment gained from attachment to a fan object are also found in the sense of belonging and community membership that the fandom provides. Applying these arguments to online political discussion suggests that pleasure drives engagement: pleasure in not only consuming political information, such as news articles, but also in reading the discussions that follow. Indeed, in my previous work examining online news commenters, I found that those reading news comments exhibited a significant pleasure from reading and contributing to the comment threads, as well as a sense of community with other commenters (Barnes 2013, 2014). The role of resistance in fan-like meaning-making and productivity also offers significant space for inquiry. It suggests that those with a particular political perspective may take pleasure in resisting ideas presented within the news article or by other commenters that they interpret as opposing that perspective. Pleasure, then, can drive polarizing contributions and positioning within online discussion. Aspects of appropriation can also be evidenced in political positioning. As outlined in the previous chapter, populism operates via a process of providing an ‘othering’ discourse for

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supporters to use to defend policies and ideologies that are exclusionary. Take for instance Trump’s focus on Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists and the need for a visible wall of exclusion. This discourse is constantly appropriated and reworked in how supporters respond to coverage of immigration issues. Likewise, Juarez Miro (2021) uses a fandom approach to examine Spanish right-wing populist supporters and finds that they appropriate party narratives and disseminate them in projects of identity and community formation on news websites. She also argues that supporters find pleasure in discussing and arguing with those of differing political affiliations. Thus, the concepts of pleasure, meaning-­making and appropriation in fandom offer an effective framework through which to understand the manifestation of polarization in online political discussion.

Community, Social Interaction and Identity Performance Central to the experience of fandom is a sense of community. This does not preclude the intrapersonal bond between fan and fan object; however, there is significant literature that focuses on the collective or communal dimensions of fandom (e.g. Busse and Gray 2011; Harrington and Bielby 1995; Jenkins 2007). As Jenkins argues (2007, 361), fandom is “an imagined and imaginative community” (361) and fans will choose different fan communities based on their interpretation or form of meaning-making associated with the fan object (Busse and Gray 2011). This community formation might be the result of active engagement (e.g. social interaction in an online group to discuss an object of fandom) or through a process of imagining oneself as one with other like-minded individuals. Fan studies examines how communities are created through communication and emotional investment (Carey 1992). In her examination of soap opera fans, Baym (2000) finds social interaction within the usernet group of romance readers creates a sense of group identity, whereby members of the group have a shared emotional connection and support. Essential to this process is the sharing of group narratives and a common language that creates a sense of belonging to the fan community. The importance of sharing group narratives and myths through a shared language enables the building of a fan community for various fan groups:

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soap opera fans, romance readers, Star Trek fans and TV show Survivor fans (Baym 2000; Jenkins 1992; Radway 1984). The building of a community around agreed group narratives and shared practices, then, creates a sense of belonging that is an essential component of fannish identity formation, management and performance. Fan scholars also argue that an examination of the fan community should not overlook those whose fandom may be hidden and not performed in public (Hill 2016; Hills 2017; Sandvoss et al. 2017). Parasocial relations with other fans can take place when the fannish activities are undertaken in isolation, creating a sense of participation in an imagined community of other fans (Busse and Gray 2011). Goggin and Emmanouloudis (2019) make a compelling case for how fans of pro-­ wrestling create an imagined community where feelings of belonging and collective identity are reinforced. Pro-wrestling, as a sporting spectacle, “relies on audiences making their presence felt” (Goggin and Emmanouloudis 2019, 136), and, therefore, without audience participation, the text of a pro-wrestling performance remains unfinished. The authors suggest that the imagined fan community of pro-wrestling relies on convergent media opportunities to allow the experience of fandom to transcend time and space and “become thoroughly imbricated in all aspects of their lives” (Goggin and Emmanouloudis 2019, 137). This approach aligns with Abercrombie and Longhurst’s (1998) “diffused audience,” which suggests that those who imagine themselves as part of an audience will feel a sense of belonging and even entertain thoughts like those of other audience members. In fact, this is one of the driving factors for people to attend performances because it enables them to have a sense of enjoying a relationship with other people. While the “diffused audience” is outlined in relation to live performance and traditional media, it has immense utility for a digital world. The networked nature of contemporary communication means that it is easier to find others with the same interests, ideals and even concerns. Fan communities, then, whether based on social interaction or imagined, produce a sense of belonging and shared purpose, and therefore are a powerful form of identity performance. It is this intersection which provides much to understanding the manifestation of polarization in online political discussion. If one has a sense of an imaginary with others who are perceived to have similar beliefs, ideals and concerns, then they will be more willing to share these beliefs in discussions. Significantly, it could also be argued, that they will in turn, then, be more stringent in defending this positioning as it forms a strong part of their

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online identity performance. As Hills (2017) notes, it is this “participatory condition where even those who do not self-identify as part of a fan community can nonetheless be perfectly well analysed and theorized, on the basis of their digital practices, as a kind of fan” (872). Identity is a potent driver of fandom. Sandvoss (2005) argues that being a fan is in essence a narcissistic practice, as the fan must see some reflection of the self in the object fandom. Fandom then becomes a central pillar of identity, and the object of fandom can be used to perform and affirm our values and self: “As the fabric of our lives is constituted through constant and staged performances, the self becomes a performed, and hence symbolic, object. In this sense fandom is not an articulation of inner needs or drives but is itself constitutive of the self. Being a fan in this sense reflects and constructs the self” (Sandvoss 2005, 48). Sandvoss (2005) articulates this narcissism through the example of sports fans and outlines how teams are imagined in their own image. If they see themselves as nationalistic, then they view their teams as nationalistic, or if they see themselves as diverse and multicultural, then they will see the team in that way. Again, these aspects of fandom offer much to the examination of polarization in online political discussion. Involvement in online political discussion can be seen as an attempt to construct a particular presentation of self. A political perspective can be appropriated and adapted so that it can be seen to be representative of the self. This pre-determined meaning, whether accurate or not, can be used to affirm our sense of self and performance of self.

Anti-fandom: Loving to Hate For some fans, the pleasure of the fan object is not in positive feelings of love or like, but instead in hate and dislike. This strand of fan studies has loosely been referred to as the “fandom is (sometimes) ugly” phase (Stanfill 2020) in opposition to the early “fandom is beautiful” wave of research (Gray et  al. 2007). Anti-fans are “those who strongly dislike a given text or genre, considering it inane, stupid, morally bankrupt and/or aesthetic drivel” (Gray 2003, 70). In this definition, Gray points to the use of paratexts or any accompanying media texts that someone might be exposed to (e.g. advertisements, or reviews) which they can use to create a version of the text that is then the centre of directed hate and dislike (Gray 2003). An anti-fan then can create a picture, or an understanding, of a text without ever interacting with the text in full.

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Journalism scholars have used a similar approach to understand media trust. Nelson and Lewis (2021) draw on the concept of folk theories of news, or “stories that people tell themselves about the news more broadly” (n.p.) to examine people’s approach to and trust in news. Folk theories of news articulate that consumers will make assumptions about bias and credibility based “on the extent to which the way that information is presented aligns with how they see the world as well as how they view themselves” (Nelson and Lewis 2021, n.p.). Folk theories of news are built on a broader form of a paratext, such as interactions with friends, family and communities, and rhetoric, as well as interaction with news (Nielsen 2016). Understanding the role of paratexts offers much to the study of polarization in online political discussion. Only a small percentage of citizens will attend political rallies or engage directly with political manifestos or speeches. For most, political knowledge is gained through media interaction, whether that be news reporting or social media. As Sandvoss (2019, 141) notes in his examination of Tea Party supporters, “by conceptualising emotive, partisan, and regular engagement in political discourses as fandom and anti-fandom we can thus begin to explore how transformations of political discourse are shaped by practices of fans’ reading practices through which the emotive focal points of their engagement with politics are maintained” (141). The anti-fan, then, can have an intense affective relationship with the anti-fan object, where community identification and participation can be outcomes, despite the anti-fan never directly engaging with the text. “Hate or dislike of a text can be just as powerful as can a strong and admiring, affective relationship with a text, and they can produce just as much activity, identification, meaning and effects, or serve to powerfully incite and sustain a community or subculture” (Gray 2005, 841). Indeed, as Click (2019, 14) notes, “the hated object, then, is crucial to the formation of the collective, and the expulsion or incorporation of the hated other is needed to maintain collective identity” (14). Just as political scientists’ articulation of affective polarization relies on othering (as noted in Chap. 1), so too does the affective engagement of the anti-fan. However, fan studies, and therefore the study of anti-fandom, provides further methods for interrogating the participatory practice associated with the othering used in identity performance. To sustain hate, expressions must be repeated and recirculated, and identities and the collective rely on the continual association of hate with the othered them (Click 2019).

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Gray (2019) outlines a typology of anti-fandom that suggests different modes of disliking based on identity positioning of the anti-fan in relation to the object of anti-fandom and sometimes also to an object of fandom. For example, competitive anti-fandom refers to directing dislike (both serious and playful) at a perceived rival. He uses the example of fans of sports teams; however, this could equally be applied to politics, with someone who is a Republican is expected to hate the Democrats and by extension liberal voters are pitted against conservative voters. In contrast, what Gray (2019) terms bad objects anti-fandom refers to one-way rivalries which might band disparate groups together. Again, he uses a sporting example of a popular dislike of the baseball team the New York Yankees. Sandvoss (2019) demonstrates the role of this mode of anti-fandom in his examination of the rise of the Tea Party, which he argues was driven by a collective dislike of Obama and the Democrats, not with a unified vision. Tea Partiers were mobilised through practices that were focused on a “politics of against” where they performed their identity position through articulation of difference and hostility to Obama and those seen to represent Obama. He further argues that individuals or groups (such as refugees) can serve as the textual formations that serve as objects of anti-fandom to others. Anti-fans antifandom refers to those who direct their anti-fandom “towards fans of the nominal anti-fan object, rather than to the object” (Gray 2019, 32). Gray points to the example of those who identified as progressives disliking the TV show 24, because Republican John McCain professed to it being his favourite series. Here a viewing group is seen as an imagined community or ‘other’, and by rejecting the fan object of the TV Show 24 a collective of progressives can be reinforced as an ‘us’. “Precisely because something is important to others and/or is popular, this individual dislikes it. This is a deeply performative form of anti-­ fandom, for even when the performance is silent, to oneself, it is a way of enacting distinction, announcing difference” (Gray 2019, 34). Gray (2019) outlines other modes including disappointed anti-fandom and hatewatching. Disappointed anti-fandom is when fans like a fan object to a point, but reject other parts of the object and feel the need to rework it. Others describe this phenomenon as a “rejection discourse,” or a critically distant viewing position toward a fan object, which enables the fan to position themselves as non-emotionally involved (Williams 2019). Politically this may happen when someone has traditionally identified as a supporter of a political party but may be critical of its contemporary policies. This person has a nostalgia (whether accurate or not) for previous

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policies or ideological positioning and seeks to reject current party framing. Indeed, populist discourse often relies on an activation of this type of nostalgia. Hatewatching refers to taking pleasure from watching something so that it can be derided. This can also manifest as a form of monitorial hatewatching. For example, someone who identifies as liberal may watch conservative Fox News as a form of monitoring what the other side has to say or because of the pleasure gained in deriding its presentation of political issues. Gray’s final modes include deep anti-fandom and fleeting anti-fandom. Here a continuum is established in which on one end it may be “deeper, hard-wired anti-fandom” (Gray 2019, 39). This deep anti-­fandom could explain the impenetrable social identity of someone who may identify as liberal and therefore refuse to engage with any ideas put forth by a conservative, despite legitimate solutions that address their concerns. At the other end of the spectrum fleeting anti-fandom can be understood as momentary anti-fandom for an object that is perceived or used to represent a larger or broader dislike or anti-fandom. Politically, this could be the use of an ‘other’ to rally disparate groups to a political cause. Here debates around immigration offer a useful political example, as they often use this discourse, resulting in a form of fleeting anti-fandom. Most recently, Gray (2021) has examined the role of dislike in audienceship. He distinguishes dislike from hate, where hate is the wish to do harm, or a precursor to violence. Truly engaged dislike may be expressed as hate, but it isn’t true hate in the sense of a threat of violence. Dislike has a degree of passion but can be distinguished from hate as it does not seek to harm the object of dislike. This is a useful distinction for this project, which seeks to examine everyday online political discussions. To reiterate (as outlined in the introduction), this book is not concerned with true hate and the political extremism that results online. In all my time observing these discussions it was overwhelmingly a passionate and engaged dislike that was evident in the polarized discussions. True, violent, hate, is of course at play on the internet and in political engagement, and it may begin with engaged dislike and grow. However, these extreme reactions were not the focus of this study. Perhaps due to moderation or the technological affordances of the space, political discussions following news stories are dominated by displays of engaged dislike, uncivil discourse and sometimes even antagonism. Just as Gray (2021) argues, understanding dislike as a mode of engagement in television viewing offers a gateway into understanding broader media consumption; understanding dislike as a driver of online political participatory behaviour also has merit in understanding the complexities of online behaviours.

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Gray (2021) argues that his conception of dislike within audiences is more nuanced than his earlier work on anti-fandom. Instead, he argues that dislike and fandom are “intricately connected” (Gray 2021, 11) and not opposites and that just as fans have specific behaviours related to engagement with the object of their fandom, so do the dislike-minded audience. Others focus on negative practices of fandom as reactionary fandom (Stanfill 2020) and toxic fan practices (Proctor and Kies 2018). Stanfill (2020) argues that Gray’s notion of the anti-fan fails to account for the role of fandom, and specific fans, in moments of oppression toward marginalised people. Fandoms, Stanfill argues, have increasingly embraced reactionary politics, while reactionary politics has increasingly taken on fannish forms. Traditionally, fandom has been linked to the political as “to position fandom as resistant (rightly or wrongly) is to stake a case for it as political” (Stanfill 2020, 126). However, due to a focus on ethnographic and autoethnographic approaches in the study of fans, scholarship has focused on fandom as a gateway to more progressive or liberal political goals. However, others argue (Stanfill 2020; Pande 2020) that it can be used to reinforce the status quo or existing power structures, with much of fan studies failing to address inequalities for people of colour, those who identify as queer and to a certain extent women. Gray (2005) in his examination of online TV discussion forum, Television Without Pity, identifies powerful extremes in group mentality in aggressive racist and sexist comments. It is this extremist end of right-wing politics which has received less attention from fan scholars. As Stanfill (2020) notes “reactionaries, too, want to change society, and they generally also see themselves and/or their views as marginalized” (128), even if they have not been traditionally excluded. As Jenkins (2018) outlines, while many have pointed to the role of new media as enhancing democracy, “we are also seeing these same mechanisms allowing more reactionary fans to organize backlashes against those whom they see as threatening traditional forms of privilege” (24). Therefore, Stanfill (2020) cautions that in our haste to recognise the progressive potential of fandom, we should not overlook the equal potential for it to facilitate and inform online antagonism and even extremism. In a similar approach, Proctor and Kies (2018) investigate whether “‘new forms’ of online fascism are mobilizing under a ‘fan cultures banner,’ rather than the other way around” (134). They point to examples of toxic fan practices such as boycott campaigns when popular comic characters are ‘rebooted’ from white men to either female or black characters. Proctor and Kies also describe the lesser investigated “progressive

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toxicity,” such as when readers angrily criticised a perceived New York Times’ complicity in extreme right-wing politics through its reporting and a special edition of the letters’ page that featured Trump supporters. They further link toxic fan practices to political and cultural polarization— in which each side rushes to take the mantle of marginalised and refute moves to do so by the other. In this way, they show that it is not just the ‘right’ that can be seen to undertake these practices—but also the ‘left’ in its attempts to overemphasise the right’s toxic reactions. This could be understood as a group narrative of contested marginalisation (Berlant 2009) as a community unifier and ultimately fuelling contemporary cancel culture. Anti-fandom, reactionary fandom and toxic fan practices provide a useful interpretative lens for examining the intense dislike that manifests in online political discussion. It suggests that the fan-like behaviours outlined—intense affective engagement; collective meaning-making and appropriation; social interaction and identity performance; and pleasure from consumption and engagement—can also lead to a darker participatory practice. As Stanfill (2020) notes, fandom is intrinsically political and given the media convergence of a digital age, the boundaries between political and popular communication, and how we engage with these texts, are increasingly porous.

Politics, Fandom, Activism and Citizenship Numerous scholars are recognising the intersection between fandom and politics. Many investigate fan activism or “intentional actions by fans, or the use of fanlike strategies, to provoke change” (Brough and Shresthova 2012, n.p.). These studies primarily focus on how the fan object, and a fan’s affective investment in that object, can be activated to support a political cause. For example, the Harry Potter Alliance targeting human rights and social justice issues (Hinck 2012; Jenkins 2015) or the charity initiatives of the Nerdfighters fan community (Hinck 2019; Lillqvist 2020). Others include use of Star Wars narratives in protests against labour law changes in Wisconsin (Gray 2012) or KPop fans activism (Jung 2012; Cho 2022). Hinck (2019) describes this type of public engagement emerging from commitment to the object of fandom as fan-citizenship. Hinck (2019) says of fan groups performing citizenship: “Historically situated at a moment when networked and digital media have proliferated, when fan

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affiliations and communities have grown in importance, and when citizenship practices seem to be in flux, the civic actions of the Harry Potter Alliance and the many other similar groups have emerged as a powerful form of citizenship” (5). Hinck (2019) distinguishes this from fan activism as it considers a broader range of political and civic actions rather than activism alone. Likewise, Henry Jenkins (2019) notes  the increasing power of fan groups to wield their affective investment as a tool of not only civic engagement, but also political intervention. “Deployed effectively, popular culture can provide a pathway into civic engagement and political participation for many who would otherwise feel excluded from or repulsed by the current state of political rhetoric” (Jenkins 2019, n.p.). Indeed, Liesbet van Zoonen (2005) argues for the similarities displayed by fans and citizens. She suggests we should not define citizens as publics produced by political communication and fans as audiences constructed from entertainment. Instead, emotion and affective intelligence are essential ingredients for engaging the public’s reason and judgement in all communication. Others echo van Zoonen, arguing media audiences are portrayed as opposed to publics incorporating citizens, and in a binary of either passive or active, or crowds or individuals (for a summary, see Duffett 2013). Contemporary media that is circulated in a digital and networked world obscures the boundary between entertainment and politics, which results in a blurring of “traditional boundaries between work and leisure, education and entertainment, domestic and civic, local and global” (Livingstone 2005, 9). Taking up this approach, some scholars directly address the intersection of politics and fandom as “political fandom” (Rodriguez and Goretti 2022); “branded politainment” and fandom (Ouellette 2012); “politicised fandom” (Dean 2017); and political enthusiasm as a form of media fandom (Sandvoss 2013). At the intersection of politics and fandom, internet users “engage in commenting, relaying and ‘remixing’ mainstream media sources as part of a wider activist agenda which includes portraying one’s own point of view, fostering critical debate and broadening support for chosen causes, fundraising efforts, and voter mobilisation” (Sandvoss 2013, 262). Both Ouellette (2012) and Sandvoss (2012, 2013) emphasis the capacity of fan communities to intervene politically, while Dean (2017) highlights the circumstances in which fandom takes on political significance. For Dean (2017) the intersection of politics and fandom is communal and is sustained through the circulation of representative claims that contest perceived injustices and aim to transform society in

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some way. The subversive and reactionary behaviours of the fan are the focus here. Dean’s (2017) articulation of political fandom can be applied then to both the fan community harnessing its members as a form of political activism (as outlined in the many examples above) and for fandom of individuals who are high-profile political and cultural figures. This model also has utility for online political discussion. Partisanship relies on representative claims, by both high-profile politicians and media, as well as ordinary individuals, for an agenda to be asserted. These claims speak to a form of perceived injustice as a way of rallying support and become markers of that partisanship when mobilised in online discussion. For example, consider a discussion on tax reform, where left and right compete over the injustice of taxing the very wealthy to support broader social initiatives. Each side takes both a subversive and reactionary stance appropriating issues for their own process of meaning-making. More recent work applies fan and anti-fan studies to political movements and in doing so expands our theoretical understanding of which texts can operate as an object of fandom. Scholars also apply a framework of fandom to more extremist political movements such as conspiracy theory QAnon and white supremacy. Reinhard et al. (2021) argue that the driving force behind QAnon is “the affect through which it coheres disparate, diverse individuals into a community of shared stakeholders who remain idiosyncratic in their interpretations of the movement’s meaning” (n.p) and as such use it as a case study to illustrate how politics can operate as a fandom. Likewise, Stanfill (2021) argues for understanding white supremacy as a fandom due to the “highly affective and participatory attachment to mediated texts” (cited in Reinhard et  al. 2021, n.p.). In both cases, both QAnon and white supremacy are fandoms around a political entity and ideology, involving affect that drives actions which manifest as fannish behaviours such as transmedia storytelling, participatory culture, community and belonging, and even merchandise. The work contained in this book seeks to build on these assertions of the intersection of politics and fandom. Politics is affective by its very nature, and analysing behaviours within online political discussion as fannish provides an opportunity to understand how and why these discussions manifest in the ways that they do. Fandom has long established the relationship between affect, interpretative textual reading and community and belonging—all factors that can drive political discussions at the expense of truth, fact and reason.

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Conclusion While the term ‘fan’ has typically been associated with  the audience of popular culture, scholars are increasingly highlighting fandom’s intersection with participatory politics. This chapter has sought to outline the utility of using the interpretative lens of fan studies to illuminate the manifestation of polarization in online political discussion, and, in doing so, add to this emerging field. Significantly, the hallmarks of fandom such as the intense mode of reception and consumption of the fan object; collective interactions; productivity; and the contestation of meanings and advocacy for these interpretations (Jenkins 1992) provide a framework for understanding the mechanisms at play in online political discussions. Fans’ capabilities for subversion and appropriation can help us understand the uses of media for political mobilisation, but also a commenter’s dogged stance on an issue in a debate. The ability of representative claims (that may or may not be true) to drive emotive and sustained disagreement within these discussions can also be linked to fannish tendencies of using the fan object as a form of identity creation and maintenance. Fan studies pushes to the forefront of inquiry a focus on the role affect plays in the processing, sharing and debating of information, which has more to do with the complex relationships with the fan object and anti-fan object than truth or facts. Cavicchi (2018) notes that historically fans have been associated with extremism through “metaphors of religious zealotry, mob disorder, or illness” (29). Similar metaphors are often used in the depiction of those active ‘below the line,’ the ardent commenters on news stories. These discussion spaces have become synonymous with a vision of the internet as a wild, socially unacceptable, hotbed of incivility and hate. However, just as scholars had to argue against the ‘othering’ of fans as negatively different from mainstream audiences, we must resist the urge to dismiss those involved in online political discussion. Understanding the behaviours that contribute to these spaces becoming uncivil, angry and ultimately extremely polarized provides hope for understanding how we can encourage inclusive debate online. The significance of the discussion in these spaces is not only in those who choose to debate there, but also in the silent majority who are reading these debates and using them as engagement with political issues. This silent majority far outweighs those who leave a visible reminder of their presence (Barnes 2014), but they are still impacted. Reading of online discussions can negatively influence perceptions about the media hosting them (Naab et  al. 2020; Dohle 2018;

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Kümpel and Springer 2016; Prochazka et al. 2018), suggesting implications for media trust and credibility. It can also inform an individual’s own affective relationship with an imagined community of like-minded individuals (Barnes 2013, 2014) and even increase the perception of distance between the opposing sides (Settle 2018), further entrenching societal polarization. It is therefore vital we broaden our repertoire for interpreting the mechanisms contributing to these discussions. In the next chapter, I will draw on the rich and diverse scholarship of fandom to make sense of the responses of highly politically engaged and regular online debaters. It will draw on these fannish behaviours to help construct an account for why these discussions so often manifest in highly polarized and uncivil interactions. Findings suggest that the fan-like behaviours of individual and collective identity performance, entertainment and affective investment drive commenting behaviours that initiate and sustain polarized online political discussion.

References Abercrombie, Nicholas, and Brian J. Longhurst. 1998. Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination. London: Sage. Ang, Ien. 1985. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. London: Routledge. Barnes, Renee. 2013. Understanding the Affective Investment Produced through Commenting on Australian Alternative Journalism Website New Matilda. New Media & Society, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444813511039. ———. 2014. The ‘Ecology of Participation’ A Study of Audience Engagement on Alternative Journalism Websites. Digital Journalism 2 (4): 542–557. Barnes, Renee, and Renée Middlemost. 2021. “Hey! Mr Prime Minister!”: The Simpsons Against the Liberals, Anti-Fandom and the “Politics of Against.” American Behavioral Scientist. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764 2211042292. Baym, Nancy K. 2000. Tune in, Log on: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. https://doi. org/10.4135/9781452204710. Berlant, Lauren. 2009. The Intimate Public Sphere. In American Studies: An Anthology, ed. Janice A. Radway, Kevin Gaines, Barry Shank, and Penny von Eschen, 109–118. Wiley Blackwell. https://books.google.com.au/ books?hl=en&lr=&id=3D9FE-­UfYxEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA109&dq=intimate+p ublics+berlant&ots=1hYLqAqDKC&sig=PWjuxU2shDE1Rsqj6_Zy52i8mZs.

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Brough, Melissa M, and Sangita Shresthova. 2012. View of Fandom Meets Activism: Rethinking Civic and Political Participation. Transformative Works and Cultures, edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10. https://doi.org/10.3983/ twc.2012.0303. Busse, Kristina, and Jonathan Gray. 2011. Fan Cultures and Fan Communities. In The Handbook of Media Audiences, ed. Virginia Nightingale, 425–443. Maldon, MA: John Wiley & Sons. Carey, J. 1992. A Cultural Approach to Communication. Routledge. Cavicchi, Daniel. 2018. A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies. In A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies, ed. Paul Booth, 27–46. John Wiley & Sons. Cho, Michelle. 2022. BTS for BLM: K-Pop, Race, and Transcultural Fandom. Celebrity Studies 13 (2): 270–279. https://doi.org/10.1080/1939239 7.2022.2063974. Click, Melissa. 2019. Introduction: Haters Gonna Hate. In Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age, 1–22. NYU Press. Click, Melissa, Jennifer Stevens Aubrey, and Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz. 2010. Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture, Media, & the Vampire Franchise. Mediated Youth: Peter Lang. Dean, Jonathan. 2017. Politicising Fandom. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 19 (2): 408–424. https://doi.org/10.1177/136 9148117701754. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1994. What Is Philosophy? New York: Columbia Press. https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?hl=en&publication_yea r=1994&author=G.+Deleuze&author=F.+Guattari&title=What+is+ph ilosophy%3F. Dohle, Marco. 2018. Recipients’ Assessment of Journalistic Quality: Do Online User Comments or the Actual Journalistic Quality Matter? Digital Journalism 6 (5): 563–582. Duffett, Mark. 2013. Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. Fiske, John. 1989. Reading the Popular. London: Routledge. ———. 1992. The Cultural Economy of Fandom. In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis, 30–49. London: Routledge. Goggin, Joyce, and Argyrios Emmanouloudis. 2019. The Pro-Wrestling Audience as Imagined Community: Reflecting on the WWE Universe as a ‘Fan-Generated Narrative’ Body. In Convergent Wrestling, 136–148. Routledge. Gray, Jonathan. 2003. New Audiences, New Textualities Anti-Fans and Non-Fans. International Journal of Cultural Studies 6 (1): 64–81. ———. 2005. Antifandom and the Moral Text: Television without Pity and Textual Dislike. American Behavioral Scientist 48 (7): 840–858.

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———. 2012. Of Snowspeeders and Imperial Walkers: Fannish Play at the Wisconsin Protests. Transformative Works and Cultures 10: 1–7. ———. 2019. How Do I Dislike Thee? Let Me Count the Ways. In Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age, ed. Melissa Click, 25–41. NYU Press. ———. 2021. Dislike-Minded: Media, Audiences, and the Dynamics of Taste. New York University Press. Gray, Jonathan, Cornel Sandvoss, and C.  Lee Harrington. 2007. Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. New York: NYU Press. Groene, Samantha L., and Vanessa E. Hettinger. 2016. Are You ‘Fan’ Enough? The Role of Identity in Media Fandoms. Psychology of Popular Media Culture 5 (4): 324. Grossberg, Lawrence. 1992. The Affective Sensibility of Fandom. In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis, 60–65. London: Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203181539. Harrington, C. Lee, and Denise D. Bielby. 1995. Soap Fans. Temple University Press. Hill, Rosemary Lucy. 2016. Gender, Metal and the Media: Women Fans and the Gendered Experience of Music. Springer. Hills, Matt. 2002. Fan Cultures. Sussex Studies in Culture and Communication. London: Routledge. ———. 2017. From Fan Culture/Community to the Fan World: Possible Pathways and Ways of Having Done Fandom. Palabra Clave 20 (4): 856–883. Hinck, Ashley. 2012. Theorizing a Public Engagement Keystone: Seeing Fandom’s Integral Connection to Civic Engagement through the Case of the Harry Potter Alliance. Transformative Works and Cultures 10: 2004–2011. ———. 2019. Politics for the Love of Fandom: Fan-Based Citizenship in a Digital World. Baton Rouge, USA: LSU Press. Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. ———. 2007. Afterword: The Future of Fandom. In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. Jonathan Alan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, 357–364. New York: NYU Press. ———. 2015. ‘Cultural Acupuncture’: Fan Activism and the Harry Potter Alliance. In Popular Media Cultures: Fans, Audiences and Paratexts, ed. Lincoln Geraghty, 206–229. Palgrave Macmillan UK. ———. 2018. Fandom, Negotiation, and Participatory Culture. In A Companion to Fandom and Fan Studies, ed. Paul Booth, 13–26. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 2019. Popular Culture as Politics, Politics as Popular Culture. Journal of Media Literacy. https://www.journalofmedialiteracy.org/jenkins-­article-­2019. Juarez Miro, Clara. 2021. Who Are the People? Using Fandom Research to Study Populist Supporters. Annals of the International Communication Association 45 (1): 59–74.

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Jung, Sun. 2012. Fan Activism, Cybervigilantism, and Othering Mechanisms in K-Pop Fandom. Transformative Works and Cultures, edited by Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 10. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2012.0300. Kümpel, Anna Sophie, and Nina Springer. 2016. Commenting Quality: Effects of User Comments on Perceptions of Journalistic Quality. Studies in Communication and Media 5 (3): 353–366. Lancaster, Kurt. 2001. Interacting with Babylon 5: Fan Performances in a Media Universe. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. Lillqvist, Ella. 2020. Always Already Nerdfighters: Constitution of an Activist Fan Community through Interpellation. Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 17: 47–66. Livingstone, Sonia. 2005. Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere: Volume 2. Intellect Books. Naab, Teresa K., Dominique Heinbach, Marc Ziegele, and Marie-Theres Grasberger. 2020. Comments and Credibility: How Critical User Comments Decrease Perceived News Article Credibility. Journalism Studies 21 (6): 783–801. Nelson, Jacob L, and Seth C Lewis. 2021. Only ‘Sheep’ Trust Journalists? How Citizens’ Self-Perceptions Shape Their Approach to News. New Media & Society, https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211018160. Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis. 2016. Folk Theories of Journalism: The Many Faces of a Local Newspaper. Journalism Studies 17 (7): 840–848. Ouellette, Laurie. 2012. Branding the Right: The Affective Economy of Sarah Palin. Cinema Journal 51 (4): 185–191. Pande, Rukmini. 2020. How (Not) to Talk about Race: A Critique of Methodological Practices in Fan Studies. Transformative Works and Cultures 33 (June). https://doi.org/10.3983/TWC.2020.1737. Prochazka, Fabian, Patrick Weber, and Wolfgang Schweiger. 2018. Effects of Civility and Reasoning in User Comments on Perceived Journalistic Quality. Journalism Studies 19 (1): 62–78. Proctor, William, and Bridget Kies. 2018. On Toxic Fan Practices and the New Culture Wars. Participations 15 (1): 127–142. Radway, Janice A. 1984. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. University of North Carolina Press. Reinhard, CarrieLynn D, David Stanley, and Linda Howell. 2021. Fans of Q: The Stakes of QAnon’s Functioning as Political Fandom. American Behavioral Scientist. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642211042294. Rodriguez, Nathian Shae, and Nadia Goretti. 2022. From Hoops to Hope: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Political Fandom on Twitter. International Journal of Communication 16: 20. Sandvoss, Cornel. 2005. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge: Polity.

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———. 2012. Enthusiasm, Trust and Its Erosion in Mediated Politics: On Fans of Obama and the Liberal Democrats. European Journal of Communication 27 (1): 68–81. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323111435296. ———. 2013. Toward an Understanding of Political Enthusiasm as Media Fandom: Blogging, Fan Productivity and Affect in American Politics. Participations 10 (1): 252–296. ———. 2019. The Politics of Against: Political Participation, Anti-Fandom and Populism. In Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age, ed. Melissa Click, 125–146. NYU Press. Sandvoss, Cornel, Jonathan Gray, C. Lee, and Harrington. 2017. Introduction. Why Still Study Fans? In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, 2nd ed., 1–26. NYU Press. Savitsky, Shane. 2019. America’s Political Polarization Extends to Its Television Habits. Axios, August 31. https://www.axios.com/television-­political-­polarization-­ succession-­wwe-­raw-­e97db462-­e55d-­4491-­98a6-­256101ff3c3a.html. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Adam Frank, and Irving E. Alexander. 1995. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Duke University Press. Settle, Jaime E. 2018. Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America. Cambridge University Press. Stanfill, Mel. 2020. Introduction: The Reactionary in the Fan and the Fan in the Reactionary. Television & New Media 21 (2): 123–134. ———. 2021. White Supremacy as a Fandom. In Society of Cinema and Media Studies, Virtual Conference. Thrift, Nigel. 2008. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. Routledge. Tomkins, Silvan S., and E. Virginia Demos. 1995. Exploring Affect: The Selected Writings of Silvan S Tomkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Zoonen, Liesbet. 2005. Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. Wetherell, Margaret. 2012. Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Williams, Rebecca. 2019. ‘Putting the Show out of Its Misery’: Textual Endings, Anti-Fandom, and the ‘Rejection Discourse’. In Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age, ed. Melissa Click, 315–332. NYU Press.

CHAPTER 4

Loving to Hate: Fandom Fuelling Polarized Behaviour

Introduction Drawing on interviews and survey results with online political commenters, this chapter will outline the key ways that fan-like behaviours, and even fandom for a political perspective and anti-fandom for an opposing political perspective, fuel polarization in online political discussion. This study was undertaken over a three-year period in which there were unprecedented national and global events fuelling polarization that manifested in deep divisions and fractures in online political discussion. In 2019 and 2020, the US was gearing up for an intense presidential election, driving a striking divide between the country’s liberals and conservatives. At the same time, Australia was quite literally on fire. Beginning in late 2019 and stretching into the early months of 2020, bushfires engulfed much of the country, with homes lost and much of the country’s East coast blanketed in smoke. Using the bushfires as a catalyst, climate activists and deniers initiated intense battles of blame. Then, of course, in March 2020 the global COVID-19 pandemic began. While countries dealt with lockdowns and health directives, the methods of coping and even the very existence of the virus itself was interpreted and discussed in emotionally charged ideological terms. By 2021, the final year of data collection, the US was grappling with the Capitol riots following Trump’s loss of the presidency, and the world with the continued fallout of the pandemic. It was a rich and varied time to collect data on the motivations and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Barnes, Fandom and Polarization in Online Political Discussion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14039-6_4

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behaviours of those taking part in often polarized online political discussion. What follows is an examination of how fandom and specifically fan-­ like behaviours may be fuelling polarization in online political discussion. Ultimately, it will argue that evaluating online political discussion within a Habermasian (1991) frame, which privileges rationality and objectivity, provides little hope in fully understanding the motivations driving interaction following news stories shared on social media. If deliberation in order to reach consensus is the ultimate goal of political discussion, then the analysis outlined here suggests that there is little hope of this. Interaction is not always rational or based on fact; but rather a performance of self, or the self that users think they should be. Defence of identity is a powerful motivator and can serve to entrench beliefs and opinions, rather than make an individual open to deliberation. This book, including this chapter, is informed by the hours I spent each day during those three years observing the interactions within the comment threads of news stories shared on Facebook. A more detailed account of the methods and instruments used for this study can be found in the Methods Appendix, however, I will provide a brief overview here to situate the data within these events. This chapter draws on interview data collected post the Australian bushfire crisis, while it was still fresh in the nation’s collective mind, during the Australian national COVID lockdown of 2020 (February–August). Participants were asked to complete a short survey to self-nominate political orientation (options were given as far left, fairly left, slightly left-of-centre, centre, slightly right-of-centre, fairly right, far right), rate of commenting (a ten-point measure from rarely to at least 10 times per day) and basic demographic data prior to the interview. Only those who commented at least weekly were invited for a full interview. This was to ensure that the motivations and behaviours of those who were regularly engaging in online political discussion were examined. The survey (n  =  306) was undertaken during July 2021 with 156 respondents from Australia and 150 for the United States. The respondents reflect a good range of self-nominated political affiliations, but do not reflect exact breakdowns in previous national elections in either country. The survey questions probed respondent’s motivations for commenting on and following news stories, and their behaviours when involved in a debate. Respondents were also asked to nominate political orientation and rate of commenting using the same measures as those for the interviewees. Participants were disqualified from the data sample if they selected ‘never’ as the option for commenting frequency.

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Following ethical conventions, interviewees have been given pseudonyms to protect their identity and survey respondents assigned a number. The interview transcripts and open responses from the survey were analysed thematically, based on a fan studies interpretative lens (as outlined in Chap. 2). Based on this analysis the following themes emerged as significant in relation to participation in online political discussion and the manifestation of polarization: identity performance (both individual and collective), the role of emotion and affective investment, and the factors of pleasure entertainment and humour. The chapter will now examine each of these themes as they relate to online political discussion and specifically how this may impact polarization.

Identity Performance As outlined in the previous chapter, identity performance plays a central part in fandom. Bennett and Booth (2015) examine the role of performance in fandom and argue that rather than performance being a fannish behaviour (as may be overtly visible in something like cosplay) it is instead one of “the characteristics of being that permeate a fannish identity.” They further note that “in the digital space, everything fans post, create, or share could be considered a type of performance” (Bennett and Booth 2015, n.p.). Fans then are involved in a form of self-expression or identity performance when they consume the fan text or are involved in any form of creative production, including taking part in communal discussions about the object of fandom (Lancaster 2001; Sandvoss 2005). Likewise, identity performance is a driving factor for those involved in online political discussion. Settle (2018) argues that contemporary politics is characterised by individuals who will emotionally evaluate parties and political perspectives, while also exaggerating party or perspective difference for reasons related to identity affirmation. In this way, both social and political identity conflate, creating a polarized network. Analyses of both the interviews and survey results show that people are driven to take part in online political discussion as a method of performing their political identity. As Debra, aged 55–64 and a fairly left commenter, reflects upon the types of comments she likes to leave: I would say I do try to be empathetic. I mean I tend to think of left-wing people as empathetic. I can’t help my bias, that’s the way I am. So, I’ll join when I think someone needs that kind of support or when I think it might help the

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­ iscussion get back on track. These discussions need to include the left, we can’t d just have right-wing people having all the say1.

Here we can see that Debra is linking her commenting style directly to her political perspective. She has a view of what she believes a ‘left-wing person’ is and how they should behave and performs that identity when involved in the discussions. She is even suggesting something of a group narrative or shared language of empathy that is used to reinforce and sustain her feels of belonging to the community of ‘left-wing people.’ Yet she is also recognising her ‘bias’—that this is the way she thinks this identity marker is performed. Also demonstrated in Debra’s response is an implied set of identity markers for those she deems to be right-wing. She is suggesting that a lack of support is consistent with domination of the comments by those with a more conservative or right-wing political perspective and, therefore, she is compelled to perform the empathy she ascribes to the ‘left.’ There are numerous other examples of this pattern of behaviour in the open responses of survey participants. Here survey respondents note similar links between their commenting style and their performance of self. In response to a question about what motivates them to comment and the style of comments they liked to make, they note: [I’m motivated by] Being anoyed [sic]at humanity and how we are progressing… [It’s] usually quite grumpy comments because there isn’t enough thought or fact given that a conservative person would naturally give. (5) (Australian, 45–54 male, fairly right-wing) Calling out the hypocrisy of snowflake ‘journalists’ [ with] intelligent and vicious comments. I make it clear that they need to consider conservative values more that align with my own and so much of the country. (98) (American, 35–44 male, slightly right-of-centre) Feeling compelled to add more to the story that perhaps may be otherwise missing… [with comments that offer] my opinion which is missing. Progressive and open-minded as most on the left would. (202) (Australian, 45–54 male, slightly left-of-centre)

In the examples above, we see a connection between how the respondent evaluates their commenting style with their self-nominated political 1  All excerpts from interviews and surveys have been provided in italics and indented for ease of identification.

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affiliation. In the first instance it is with fact and thought which are ‘natural’ for someone who is conservative. For Commenter 98 it is because they need to distinguish themselves from the ‘snowflake’ (a derogatory term used to describe those with left-leaning political views) journalists. Conservative values are something that are inherent and must be performed in the discussion. The final commenter (202) nominates their commenting style as progressive and open-minded which they link to ‘the left.’ This commenter, like 5, points to taking part in the discussion due to the need to be seen, but also to represent themselves and their point of view. Sandvoss (2005) argues that fandom is a form of narcissistic behaviour in that a fan projects their own beliefs and identity onto the fan object and therefore the fan object becomes integral to the performance of self. The object of fandom, then, is deeply interwoven into the fan’s sense of self and importantly who they would like to be. By performing this self, the process of creating the desired self is enacted. Viewing political perspective as a form of fandom provides an avenue for examining how performance of a ‘desired’ self is enacted in online political discussion. A political affiliation as broadly defined as ‘left’ or ‘right’ is ascribed values, behaviours and beliefs forming a type of fan text. As a fan text this political affiliation is used as a mirror in which an individual can recognise themselves through these ascribed meanings. Defence of the self, and even of others who are seen to represent these ascribed values, behaviours and beliefs becomes a driving force in commenting in these discussions. The above comments speak to a form of collective identity for an imagined community of those perceived to have a similar political identity. This collective identity is enacted through a group narrative. For commenters 5 and 98, they have an imagined or ascribed set of behaviours and values for someone who is ‘conservative’, while for commenter 202, the attributes of being progressive and open minded are ascribed to the ‘the left’ and therefore commenting is a form of protecting or defending the collective identity of the imagined community. This need for commenters to represent themselves and their opinion is further expressed as a need to distinguish themselves from those who represented differing political perspectives. As Ted, 25–34 who nominates as fairly right-wing, explains: Look, I’m a conservative and these comment threads are often missing that. There’s just so many liberal lefties in there and I just need to add some common sense. It annoys me that they seem to be the only views that people are listening

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to. I know other people think like me and I think that I need to represent that. There’s, as I say, a need to for common sense, otherwise these threads are just pointless.

Or as this American, 35–44 female, slightly left-of-centre, outlines: [I leave comments that] any progressive would leave. It’s a matter of balancing things out especially anything to do with Trump so that common sense can prevail. (83)

Here we can see examples of identity performance where there is an element of superiority attached to the respondents’ own nominated political identity. By pointing to media and cultural studies reliance on Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Gray (2021) suggests that research has conflated dislike with elitism. Active audiences, like fans, are seen to fight hegemony with acts of like and love, while dislike is associated with hegemony and power. Of course, dislike can be used to perform superiority, as Gray (2021) finds with audiences of television, and as noted here, with those involved in online political discussion. However, Gray (2021) also finds, for these audiences, dislike “performs any form of identity-based superiority, whether that be gendered, raced, nationalized, or other” (17). In particular, he notes how the performance of dislike is used to articulate an ‘us’ and a ‘them.’ In this way, a professed dislike is a script of self and more importantly what one is not— the other. It can be used to perform who someone thinks they are, but also who they think they should be. Likewise, for those involved in online political discussion, dislike is a powerful expression of identity. As demonstrated in the examples above, the performance of identity hinges on the distinction of one’s political perspective or affiliation from those viewed as on the opposing side. Performance of identity and othering does not rely on having a position on either end of a political binary. Even those who self-nominated as ‘centralists’ indicated that their commenting behaviour was based on how they believe a ‘centralist’ self should behave. As Charlotte, 35–44-year-old centralist outlines: Typically, I believe that a thread of conversation should have a balance to it and if I feel like the thread doesn’t have a balance that talks about both sides of an issue I’ll tend to comment. That’s probably the chief driver because I’m quite a centralist and I tend to view things at the issue level rather than the political party and things are complicated.

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Charlotte is asserting that part of her identity as a centralist is not only that she is balanced, but that she will consider things based on the issue rather than political affiliation. Oscar, a 25–34-year-old centralist, also suggests he performs an identity that he ascribed to a centralist. It seems crazy, you know, to say that you join these discussions to hear both sides, because I guess most people don’t or won’t, but I really do. I am a centralist so that’s what we do. We aren’t interested in a particular party we want to understand the issues. I try to bring that to the discussions… try to encourage that focus on at least listening.

Both Charlotte and Oscar echo a similar group narrative for centralists; one in which they are balanced and focused on issues rather than ideology or political parties. Yet while they claim to focus on the issues, they are still drawn to, and motivated by, interactions with other commenters. Interestingly, an associated narrative has been reflected in empirical studies of Twitter users. Bright (2018) finds groups that sit at the extremes of the ideological scale are less likely to interact, while centralists were more likely to engage. As political scientists note, political identity is established at an early age and rarely changes over time (Campbell et al. 1960; Sears 1975; Iyengar et al. 2019). This is reflected in the interviews with those heavily involved in online political discussion. They often link their political affiliation with the type of media they consumed and trusted, along with a family or historical connection. As the examples below show, often their political identity is linked to family and/or parental values. As Barbara, a 35–44-year-old slightly left-of-centre commenter, notes, she watches Australian public service television (often criticised by conservative governments as more left-leaning) as her source of news as this aligns with a political identity that was established based on her parent’s beliefs. I watch ABC, SBS [that] comes from my parents, what they watched and what they, I guess, believed in, so my parents were teachers. I guess they’re slightly left wing, so it appeals to me because I have a lot of their likes and whatever…. I mainly comment on ABC because you know as I said that appeals to me and you do find that people are more the same way inclined. I can go in and discuss facts and real issues with sane people. Of course, you have those people that come every time to say that the ABC is biased but you just ignore them.

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Here the tapestry of identity performance is layered. It starts with a political perspective that is linked to her family values and then this is reflected in the type of media consumed and the choice of place where political discussion is undertaken, which in Barbara’s case is on articles shared by ABC on Facebook. As noted in Chap. 1, the phenomenon of confirmation bias in online media use has often been used to describe the seeking of information that supports one’s own beliefs and assumptions (see Nickerson 1998). However, Barbara can still be critical of ABC even when selecting it as a preference. It’s frustrating that they give climate deniers the same amount of airtime as real scientists. This strange way of appeasing the right and the government. We really need an ABC that is strong enough to stand up to that kind of pressure. But it’s not as if I am suddenly going to switch to the Murdoch papers that just preach craziness to the right heartland. At least there is some form of sense on the ABC.

Here there is a conflation of political affiliation as a form of identity and media choice. Barbara chooses ABC because she believes it best reflects her political values, even if not exactly. The role of media choice and trust, as it relates to fan-like behaviours in online political discussion, will be discussed in more detail in Chap. 5. However, it is important to note here that, political affiliation, media choice and historical or family values are all intertwined in Barbara’s sense of self. This sense of self then informs where and how she performs this self in online political discussion. The examples outlined above show a link between identity performance and style of commenting in these discussions. Analysis of the interviews also suggests that the given commenting style is linked to identity performance, then it was not something that is easily changed. When asked whether her opinion had ever been changed due to an online political discussion, Samantha, a slightly right-of-centre 55–64-year-­ old, outlines: Do you mean have I shifted my view? Probably not. Sometimes I guess it might have helped explain why I had that view, I might have gone oh yeah, I hadn’t thought of it like that, but that generally doesn’t shift my view. I’m more likely to use it [the discussion] to help me understand why I have that particular view.

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Samantha is using online discussions with those of differing political opinions to clearly distinguish an ‘other.’ She uses her involvement in the discussion, not to broaden her view or with a potential for consensus, but instead, to reaffirm her own opinion and in doing so reassert her identity. Or as Bryce, a fairly left-wing 25–34-year-old, notes: If you sit down 10 people and say okay, we need to get to a consensus then maybe, but that’s not what people are coming to the internet to do, people are coming to the internet to share their own opinion and to convince other people. If I’m honest that’s what I’m doing.

This sentiment was also reflected in the open survey responses where respondents note that they joined online political discussions to: To share my opinion. It’s my right. (30) (American, 44–55, male, centralist) To present my values and my point of view. (46) (American, 34–45, female, slightly left-of-centre) I do it to make sure that it’s not just libtards. I want people to know my opinion and to just show how stupid they are. (9) (American 34–45, male, very right-wing)

These examples point to participation as an assertion of self through presenting opinions, values and points of view, not to discuss issues to reach a consensus, a core role of public debate in a rationalist and objective Habermasian (1991) public sphere. Instead, these examples point to participation as a tool of identity performance more in line with fans of popular culture. There was also evidence of a need for connection and interaction with a community as a form of collective identity formation. As these survey respondents note when asked what motivated them to comment in political discussions: Sharing feelings with like-minded readers (93) (American, 65–74 male, fairly right-wing) It really gets to me [to] have to share my point of view to see if people can relate. (18) (Australian, 18–24 female, fairly left-wing)

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The need for verification (52) (Australian,25–34 male, centralist)

Here these commenters are using their participation in the discussions to connect with others with a similar political perspective, but also so that others can ‘relate’ and they as a commenter can be ‘verified’. This suggests that the belonging created through performance and acknowledgement of collective identity is a potent factor for motivating participation in online political discussion. In some cases, discussion or comments that were perceived as an attack on an individual’s identity, or even a collective identity for those self-­ classified as the ‘in-group’, only served to entrench existing political views. When outlining why they join online discussion, these Australian commenters note: When something is clearly biased and does not represent my beliefs and values. (82) (Australian, 45–55 female slightly right-of-centre) Passion of a topic, support or opposition regarding my morals and values. (15) (Australian, 45–54 female, centralist)

Or as this American very right-wing 45–54-year-old male comments: To support President Trump and his supporters. When it makes me angry because it’s wrong or untrue. (105)

These responses suggest the motivation for joining online discussion can be about defending, in commenter 82’s and 15’s examples, identity, and for 105, a collective identity of Trump supporters. Respondent 105 also notes the role of anger in his decision to join discussions. Emotion and affective investment are the next theme that emerged from analysis of the interviews and survey responses and will be discussed in more detail below. However, for 105 we see anger as informing a defence of individual and collective identity. As outlined, the role of performance and defence of identity in online political discussion has implications for understanding how online debates often end in antagonism and entrenched polarization. Seen as a function of fan-based reactions, discussion about political issues becomes less about facts and evidence and more about affective reactions to a perceived threat to collective and individual identity. On the one hand commenters on

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political discussions are performing a self, based on beliefs and values they have assigned to their political affiliation, much as Sandvoss (2005) describes the narcissistic tendencies of the fan. The pre-­determined values and beliefs ascribed to these political affiliations (whether true or not), help drive motivation to join discussion as well as the type and style of comments left. There is also evidence of Abercrombie and Longhurst’s (1998) “diffused audience” where social interaction, real or imagined, produces a sense of belonging and shared purpose with those perceived to have a similar political perspective. As outlined in the examples above, there is a sense of an imaginary with others who are perceived to have similar beliefs, ideals and concerns, driving readers to share these beliefs in discussions. Equally, this imagined collective drives a defence of the imagined shared political perspective as it forms a strong part of an individual’s online identity performance. Significantly the identity performance is driven as much by a sense of who they are, as by who they are not. Performance of self in online political discussion is driven by a need to distinguish from the ‘other’ where dislike drives “claims to identity that simultaneously instantiate, conjure and articulate both individual and communal identity when ‘performed’” (Gray 2021, 159).

The Role of Emotion and Affective Investment The performance of a fan identity is driven by an affective investment in the fan object, which informs the investment in that identity and the imagined community associated with it. As outlined in Chap. 2, emotion and affect are often used interchangeably within scholarship. Here I distinguish the terms, with emotion understood in line with Wahl-Jorgensen (2019) as something that can be mediated through media texts, “that may become public and collective through naming, articulation and circulation” (8). While affect, in line with its use in fan studies (Grossberg 1992), is embodied meaning-making. Affective investment can inform a practice, such as communication, as a result of an intense and often spontaneous reaction to stimuli. Traditionally in fan studies, love and like drive the investment of the fan, while hate and dislike drive the investment of the anti-fan (Click 2019). Of course, affective practice can involve a broader range of emotions. For example, political scientists find that emotions such as anger, fear and shame can drive political engagement (see, e.g., Thrift 2008; Kimball et al. 2014). As discussed in the following section,

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analysis of the interviews and survey data found a strong link between emotion and affective investment, and motivation and behaviour in online political discussion. Survey respondents were asked to nominate whether involvement with online political discussion resulted in an emotive reaction. The statements provided as options were created based on prior political participation literature (Thrift 2008; Kimball et al. 2014) along with that from cultural theorist Annette Gibbs. Gibbs (2011) outlines that some affects, particularly anger, fear and enjoyment are highly contagious. She argues that the “internet appropriates some of the features of intimate conversations” enabling a use of the personal to influence wider social, cultural and political discourses (Gibbs 2011, 263). This creates then a form of an intimate public (Berlant 2008). The statements were further informed by a pilot survey (for details see Methods Appendix), which provided an open response space for those surveyed to outline how taking part in an online political discussion had made them feel. Based on this previous work and the pilot study, the following options were provided to respondents: • Fear related to how the country is changing politically • Anger at a view or views presented by someone or groups that I did not agree with • Joy related to feeling more informed as a result of a discussion • Satisfaction at correcting misinformation or changing a point of view • Shame for taking part in a discussion that was uncivil • Other • None of these As outlined in Table  4.1, both anger and satisfaction were the most nominated emotion. Interestingly, those on the more extreme ends of the political binary were more likely to nominate that they felt one of these nominated emotions. Across all political affiliations, emotion can be seen as a driving factor in political participatory practice. Fan scholars (see Jenkins 1992) point to the role of resistance in fan-like meaning-making and productivity. Those nominating satisfaction as a driving emotion when commenting suggest there is pleasure in resisting ideas presented within the news article or by other commenters that they interpret as opposing their own perspective. These results suggest the presence of Papacharissi’s (2010) affective public, or a networked public that is brought together by expressed sentiment, albeit most likely in a fleeting way. Sentiments of

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Table 4.1  Feelings associated with taking part in a political discussion by political affiliation Political affiliation Total Very Fairly Slightly Centre Slightly Fairly Very left-­ leftleft-ofright-­of-­ right- rightwing wing centre centre wing wing In the past week have you had any of the following experiences when involved in online political discussion

Total count Fear related to how the country is changing politically Anger at a view or views presented by someone or groups that I did not agree with Joy related to feeling more informed as a result of a discussion Satisfaction at correcting misinformation or changing a point of view Shame for taking part in a discussion that was uncivil Other None of these

306 80

26 9

28 6

40 8

131 30

17 6

32 6

32 15

93

11

11

9

32

5

10

15

79

9

6

13

33

7

5

6

96

13

7

13

31

9

10

13

19

2

3

4

4

1

5

1

10 81

1 2

2 6

0 11

4 43

2 3

0 10

1 6

fear, anger, shame, joy and satisfaction are produced as a result of interaction in online political discussion and serve to create and dismiss bonds with other commenters. As you can see from the table, respondents were also given the option to list other feelings that they had when interacting in online political discussions. These included ‘rage’ (10) ‘disgust’ (68, 53,11,10) ‘amused’ (15, 67, 209), ‘anxious’ (21, 300) and ‘bored’ (248).

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Again, respondents note the emotive experience of online political discussions with a broader range of emotions. Of course, social media platforms have provided the technological affordances for users to easily flag these feelings. Facebook, in particular, has broadened the ease of reflecting emotion with the like button along with a wide variety of emotions including love, amusement, care, anger, sadness and surprise. Scholars argue by simply providing low labour intensive (you simply need to click rather than write a comment) access to this range of responses, Facebook could potentially be shaping user feelings themselves and helping to create “emotive publics” (Stark 2020, 299). Certainly, the open responses outlined here indicate a larger repertoire of emotional responses, however, whether these are induced by the technological affordances or not, they shape participation within online political discussion. Respondents were also asked to outline what motivated them to comment, and intense emotion is evident. For example: It stirs my anger (65) (American, 65–74 female, very left-wing) It all depends on the content of the news story, if it something I hold close to my heart, for example, then I will definitely comment (17) (Australian, 25–34 female, centralist) Something tragic, interesting, or exciting (190) (American, 45–54 female, fairly right wing) If I vehemently agree or disagree with a post (205) (American, 75–84 male, fairly right-wing) If its [sic] something I’m passionate about or if something is stupid (23) (Australian, 18–24 female, centralist) I want to express my feelings (234) (Australian, 25–34 male, centralist) If the story moves me (211) (American, 65–74 male, centralist) If something I see I feel passionate about or it infuriates me (37) (Australian, 25–34 female, slightly left-of-centre) If it really frustrates me (49) (Australian, 35–44 female, fairly right-wing)

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Here we see evidence of commenting in online political discussion as an affective practice. In some cases, it is the original news story, and in others, comments by other readers, that produce the emotive reaction that is then reproduced when they comment. It is not hard to extrapolate the potential then for these comment threads to devolve into uncivil and emotionally charged tussles. A feedback loop of increasing emotional reactions or “affective contagion” (Gibbs 2011) results as each comment elicits feelings of further anxiety or anger, prompting further affective commenting. While there is some evidence of the positive emotions of passion and joy, the predominant emotions felt when engaging with online political discussion, and motivating the leaving of comments, are negative emotions of anger, rage and frustration. Here anti-fandom provides a useful tool for exploring the implications of behaviours driven by these feelings. While not explicitly outlined as hate or as dislike, there are numerous examples of these emotions for those deemed ‘other’ as motivating factors for leaving comments. For example: Far left idiots (24) (Australian, 25–34 male, slightly right-of-centre) I only leave a comment when it’s about Trump. He’s a fucking idiot! (108) (American, 55–64 female, centralist) Politically correct left wing hypocrites (228) (American, 75–84 male, very right-wing)

The above comments are examples of an emotionally charged distinction of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ It could be argued that strong identification with a political perspective, like fan affiliations, is articulated through differences and hostilities to those representing an opposing perspective (Sandvoss 2005; Hills 2002; Duffett 2013). For Sandvoss (2019), political anti-fandom is about a projected ‘other’ that is subjected to a politics of against, as opposed to an initial positive identification with a fan object. “Fandom, much like language, thus effectively operates through a matrix of binary distinctions in which the self and its projective imagination are articulated as much as through what is disliked, rejected or even hated— through the anti-fan object—as through the fan object” (Sandvoss 2019, 134). Commenters 24 and 108 provide examples of what Gray (2019) terms “bad objects” anti-fandom, where it is stated and assumed that the ‘other’ is bad. Interestingly, overwhelmingly in both the interviews and survey responses the ‘other’ was not particular politicians or political

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parties, but most often a broad view of the opposing or differing political opinion designated as ‘the left’ or ‘the right’, or liberals or conservatives. Notable exceptions to this were US president Donald Trump or Australian prime minister Scott Morrison. Perhaps this isn’t surprising given the timing of data collection and that both have been hugely divisive figures during their leadership in each country. An overwhelming focus on a broad political affiliation, however, suggests that hate and dislike of the other, or those deemed to represent the other, are drivers of a political perspective—not necessarily love or like of a party or person. Those interviewed were asked to nominate any politicians that they particularly liked or disliked. All of the 22 interviews nominated various politicians (past and present) that they disliked; however, only two nominated those they liked (interestingly both the then current conservative prime minister Scott Morrison and former conservative prime minister Tony Abbott). As Mark, a slightly left-of-centre 18–24-year-old, notes: Does anyone really love a politician? [laughs]. Look I love politics, I’m really into it and there are you know, there are heaps of politicians I can’t stand. I mean Barnaby Joyce makes me want to throw something at the TV. But that’s pretty much all of the Coalition (conservative Australian parties the Liberals and Nationals).

Affective investment in politics driven by dislike, then, appears to have more reticence than that which is driven by like. As noted above, this is partly driven by the role of distinguishing oneself from a defined other in the performance of self. But as outlined, it is also a driving factor in the investment in a political affiliation and the behaviours associated with that investment in online political discussion. Comments that are driven by a need to establish a clear ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and which begin from a place of dislike, are not conducive to civil and reasoned debate. That is not to say that on their own these emotions are unwelcome or should be dismissed. As Gray (2021) argues, often dislike is dismissed as just a lack of like, meaning that we often miss the instructive and constructive role that dislike plays in mediated communication. However, as I have argued here, dislike as an emotion, is a potent force in participatory political practice driving engagement with politics more broadly as well as political commentary and discussion. Anger too has a role in motivating political collective and action (Wahl-Jorgensen 2019). Likewise, despite these emotions being dismissed as ‘negative,’ they do not preclude pleasure or entertainment.

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Pleasure, Entertainment and Humour Pleasure, entertainment and humour are all facets of fan-like behaviour (Ang 1985; Duffett 2013). For Booth (2010), fan activities are informed by a “philosophy of playfulness.” This playfulness can manifest in productive activity that is used to situate the fan within a hierarchy of fandom, where fans compete over knowledge, access to the object of fandom and status (Dell 1998; Harris 1998; Jancovich 2002). Those involved in online political discussion exhibit similar behaviour. As Penny, a slightly right-of-­ centre 65–74-year-old, suggests of her commenting style: I prefer to be either super-factual or kind of playful like, ‘oh that’s an interesting idea and I never knew that would be possible’, that sort of thing, but then come in with a sarcastic kind of retort. Sometimes that’s the best way to make your point or make them listen.

Penny is using her playful and sarcastic approach to make ‘them’ (presumably those who have a differing opinion) listen. Humour and playfulness are tools in her commenting arsenal, which she uses to assert her control of knowledge. Lucas, a slightly left-of-centre 55–64-year-old, enjoys discussions where humour is used to make a point. Sometimes there will be someone with a totally different stance, or position to mine, but they will be quite eloquent or funny and I appreciate that. I don’t change my mind of course, but I enjoy that kind of discussion.

For Lucas, interaction and engagement is driven by a sense of play or fun, where humour helps him ‘appreciate’ a discussion or particular commenter. However, he is clear that even when this approach is used, it does not change his mind. He is suggesting that engagement with the discussion is not driven by any sense of reaching consensus, but instead by entertainment. Tom, a 25–34-year-old male centralist, says he finds humorous comments allow him to connect with like-minded readers, but also to determine his ‘other’. I do have a sense of humour and if I’m just going to post a one-line comment, a humorous one-line comment, I’ll do that. If other people share the same sort of humour with a laugh then that’s great. Sometimes people do respond and you know you’ve connected. As we all know there’s all different types of responses

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online, there might be people laughing at it, sharing a joke and there might be people who don’t like it and start to troll you as well. To be honest I find it all entertaining, even the trolling and it’s a good way to find out who is on your side.

Here, Tom outlines his use of humour to engage with the discussion and feel some sense of community with those on his ‘side.’ His particular sense of humour is a marker of his ‘us’ as a form of a group narrative or shared language. However, he also highlights that he is driven by the pleasure of entertainment. Entertainment though is not just derived from connecting with like-minded readers, but also when those disagree or ‘troll’ him. He offers the following example of how he uses his humorous comments in this way, by describing a comment about Barrie Cassidy, an ABC (Australia’s public service broadcaster) political journalist, who he describes as “incredibly annoying.” There was this story with a photo of Barrie Cassidy and he’s posing, he’s leaning against a wall and he’s leaning showing his left side. So I write, there’s Barrie still leaning to the left. Obviously, it has no meaning, it’s a joke, but from the response you quickly tell who are mindless lefty followers and who might be a little more critical.

In this instance humour is used as a tool of distinction. Tom is using it to distinguish his ‘us’ and ‘them,’ while simultaneously deriving pleasure from the interactions, both positive and negative. For Tom, to be left and not appreciate his joke is ‘mindless’ while those who laugh with him show signs of more ‘critical’ appraisal. It is not just active engagement which is driven by pleasure and entertainment. Just the reading of political discussion can be driven by what Gray (2019) describes in his taxonomy of anti-fandom as hatewatching, where one takes pleasure from watching something so that it can be derided. Sometimes I actually just watch the comments and I go this is really fascinating. This is not about the story, it’s actually about two or three people grandstanding and then having a go at each other, it can get quite mean. In a lot of cases they don’t know each other and they’re just having a go at each other because they don’t agree and it detracts from the political discussion and is really not even a proper discussion, but it can still be really entertaining just watching them tit for tat. I’m not interested in joining that type of discussion though. (Samantha, 54–65, slightly right of centre)

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Samantha is deriving entertainment from watching a discussion devolve into antagonism. While she admits it detracts from the political discussion, she still admits to enjoying the conflict. Samantha is clear that she is not involved in these discussions, inferring that she is above this type of behaviour. As Gilbert (2019, 77) argues, television anti-fans undertake hatewatching as a performance of taste, in which “individuals situate themselves as a discrete, and assuredly superior, subgroup of popular culture consumers” (77). Samantha’s fascination with watching online political discussions that are not ‘proper’ acts in a similar way, allowing her practice of hatewatching to act as a performance of superiority. Barbara, a slightly left-of-centre 34–45-year-old, is far more direct in making classist assumptions in her hatewatching. News.com.au can be entertaining. So sometimes I’ll go on there and they are terrible for their spelling errors and things like that, but sometimes I still find myself going on there reading their articles.

Murdoch-owned News.com.au is described by Barbara a ‘right-wing click-bait’ or as ‘not serious media.’ However, Barbara is using her dislike and subsequent hatewatching of the website, as a performance of class identity. However, it is not just the articles that she uses in this way, but also the comments of other readers. Sometimes when, like for instance Scott Morrison is doing some live thing, and it’s on Facebook and you should see the comments that come through and the little emojis that go up and down and you just think okay this will be fun…. what people are commenting—this is going to sound really terrible, but they just don’t sound very smart. I don’t know, that sounds really terrible.

Barbara is making a very clear class distinction between herself and the readers and commenters on News.com.au. There is an inferred link between their level of education and their political affiliation. Barbara’s dislike and derision of these commenters is a performance of taste, that has little to do with political policy or ideology, but more as performance of distinction. Barbara is not just performing othering, she is performing superiority in purely classist terms, in line with Bourdieu (1986), by wielding social, linguistic and cultural capital. As Gilbert (2019, 74) asserts, hatewatchers “are effectively organizing themselves, other viewers, and fans into hierarchical construct of the viewing audience” (74).

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Others suggest that politics more broadly can provide pleasure and entertainment just as objects of popular culture can. I don’t listen to music, I don’t watch my history on TV, I just listen to podcasts from both left and right conversations and I don’t agree with everything that both the left and right say, but I’m okay, that’s interesting ‘cause it’s sort of entertaining, really. I like getting really caught up in the issue, you know and feeling like I know all there is to know and then I can be very clear in my opinion when I share it. (Tom, 25–34-year-old male centralist)

Much as fans use their knowledge of the fan object to assert themselves within the fan community, Tom does the same for politics. He gains pleasure from knowing ‘all there is to know.’ Or as an Australian, fairly left-­ wing, 24–35-year-old, Bryce describes his fascination with US politics as akin to sport fandom. I follow US politics as I don’t really follow a sport and US politics is a lot like a sport. You’ve got your blue and your red teams and you got your players and you’ve got your big season finale, like a grand final every four years, and I get very invested in that in a way that other people get invested in sports.

Bryce derives pleasure from his investment in US politics, just as a fan of a sports team does. As an Australian, there is a distance for Bryce, he can be invested in his US political ‘team’ as a fun and playful pleasure, but there are little implications in his everyday life. The antagonism is removed as he doesn’t engage with fans of the opposing team. I’m obviously blue all the way and I find myself reading everything I can about the particular characters, both blue and red. There is a certain morbid fascination with Trump, but then I guess I’ve never really had to interact with someone who voted for him.

Barbara also derives an anti-fan like pleasure from following information about Donald Trump. I guess I cannot stand Donald Trump but I find it all immensely amusing, watching like a slow train crash.

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In these examples, pleasure is derived from politics as a form of performance, much like a sports team or even soap opera. As Australians, both Bryce and Barbara can be distanced from the real and everyday implications of deep divides between Republicans and Democrats in the US, so they can engage with the conflicts as a form of entertainment. For all of those interviewed there is a pleasure that is derived from engaging with politics as a whole. Those interviewed expressed an intense interest and engagement with politics, regardless of their political preference. They were also chosen to participate in this study because they regularly commented on news articles shared on Facebook. As such they provide a rich insight into the role that pleasure, entertainment and even humour play in their engagement with online political discussion. There was pleasure in engaging with the political, but also in exerting a political identity through the assertion of knowledge in discussion. Humour or playfulness were tools of engagement used to assert control in political discussion and to determine an imagined ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Pleasure was also found in a form of hatewatching where a distinction based on superiority could be made with others involved in online political discussion.

Conclusion Based on the analysis of the interviews and survey responses, this chapter sought to outline how identity performance, emotion and affective investment, along with pleasure, entertainment and humour, informed online political discussion. Analysis shows that these are potent factors in how participants engage with, and conduct themselves in, online political discussion. In some cases, it could be argued, those taking part in online political discussion are fans of a particular political perspective or affiliation, even if that is as loose as a left-wing or right-wing perspective. Each individual may load these binaries with different beliefs and values, but they inform how they participate in online discussions. As a ‘fan’ of a particular perspective, they undertake a performance of self that is informed by the beliefs and values that they have ascribed to that political affiliation. These performances are characterised by use of group narratives and language choices that are deemed to represent an imagined community of other ‘likeminded’ individuals. The performance of self, then, through interaction in online political discussion is about a projection of who they believe they are, or should be, as it relates to their self-nominated political affiliation.

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These performances reflect levels of emotional intensity. As a measure of emotional intensity or engagement, Sandvoss’ (2013) spectrum of fans is useful. This study was designed to illicit responses from those who contribute to the discussions following news stories. Therefore, the largest group, the casual or ordinary fans, who Sandvoss (2013) defines as only semiotically active, which in this case would be those who only regularly read the comment threads, would not be represented here. That is not to say that they are not relevant. They are by far the largest group, who don’t visibly flag their engagement through leaving a comment. They are also impacted by the discussion they read (Barnes 2013, 2014; Naab et  al. 2020). However, as this study is concerned with the manifestation of polarization in online political discussion, only active contributors were sought. As such those represented here are both enunciatively and textually productive, making them more akin to ‘cultists’ and ‘enthusiasts’ (Sandvoss 2013, 260–261). The emotional intensity is therefore higher and results in more sustained affective engagement. Emotion, not fact, as would be expected of deliberative discussion, drives their participation, highlighting the problem with viewing online political discussion in a Habermasian fashion. It is also evident that other fan-like behaviours drive involvement in online political discussion and could help explain the deep polarization that manifests. Significantly, there is evidence of communal behaviours, or what Sandvoss (2019) terms a “politics of against,” whereby participants are involved in a process of othering. This othering is based on a process of dividing the world into distinct groups of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and acting accordingly. Participants suggest they use particular behaviours to divide those involved in online political discussion in this way. Their performance of self is driven by this division, a tool for seeking verification from those deemed to be in the in-group and distinguish themselves from those relegated to the out-group. It can also drive an overall engagement with politics, where dislike of the ‘them’ is the driving force in engagement with political information and in some cases interaction. Hatewatching out-group commenters, or media seen to represent the out-group, is also used by participants as a form of taste performance, where superiority to the ‘them’ is signalled. This consumption or discussion of media texts is driven by entertainment, much like an anti-fan of a television show, and not by a desire to be further informed. This has significant implications for understanding how online political discussion manifests.

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Overall, participants suggest emotion was a driving factor in their interactions in online political discussion. While there are elements of joy, hope and pleasure, predominantly affective investments in the discussions are driven by dislike, anger and frustration. These same emotions are the driving force in affective investment in a self-nominated political perspective, where participants suggested they were less driven by a clear ideological or policy vision of a political party and more by a need to be seen as aligned with a particular perspective against an opposing perspective. Based on this analysis, a Habermasian frame, that privileges rationality and objectivity, at the expense of the emotive, does not provide an accurate picture of the factors that drive interaction in online political discussion. How an individual behaves in these discussions is not always rational or based on fact, but rather, in one way or another, a performance of self, or the self that users think they should be. Performance and the defence of identity is a powerful behavioural motivator and can serve to entrench beliefs and opinions, rather than make an individual open to deliberation. Does this suggest, then, that all hope is lost? That as a society we will find ourselves further polarized? Perhaps, but the analysis here also shows that the rational is not separate and distinct from the emotional and that emotion is needed to harness enthusiasm and desire to engage with politics and political discussion generally. Understanding participatory political practice in this way suggests harnessing affective investment in politics could have beneficial outcomes. In the next chapter, I explore a case study of a closed Facebook group that aimed to bring the left and the right together to debate political issues. This case study examines the methods used to try to encourage informative and civil debate and ultimately why the group failed in its mission. It shows that even with the best of intentions to create productive and inclusive discussions, fandom for a political perspective can drive polarization.

References Abercrombie, Nicholas, and Brian J. Longhurst. 1998. Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination. London: Sage. Ang, Ien. 1985. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. London: Routledge. Barnes, Renee. 2013. Understanding the Affective Investment Produced through Commenting on Australian Alternative Journalism Website New Matilda. New Media & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444813511039.

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———. 2014. The ‘Ecology of Participation’ A Study of Audience Engagement on Alternative Journalism Websites. Digital Journalism 2 (4): 542–557. Bennett, Lucy, and Paul J.  Booth. 2015. Performance and Performativity in Fandom. Transformative Works and Cultures 18 (March). https://doi. org/10.3983/TWC.2015.0675. Berlant, Lauren. 2008. The Female Complaint. Duke University Press. https:// doi.org/10.1515/9780822389163/HTML. Booth, Paul. 2010. Digital Fandom: New Media Studies. Vol. 68. New  York: Peter Lang. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. The Forms of Capital. In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G.  Richardson, 241–258. New  York: Greenwood Publishing Group. Bright, Jonathan. 2018. Explaining the Emergence of Political Fragmentation on Social Media: The Role of Ideology and Extremism. Journal of ­Computer-­Mediated Communication 23 (1): 17–33. https://doi.org/10. 1093/jcmc/zmx002. Campbell, Angus, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes. 1960. The American Voter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Click, Melissa. 2019. Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age. NYU Press. Dell, C.E. 1998. Lookit That Hunk of a Man: Subversive Pleasures, Female Fandom and Professional Wrestling. In Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture, and Identity, ed. Cheryl Harris and Alison Alexander. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Duffett, Mark. 2013. Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. Gibbs, A. 2011. Affect Theory and Audience. In The Handbook of Media Audiences, ed. Virginia Nightingale, 251–266. Maldon, MA: John Wiley & Sons. Gilbert, A. 2019. Hatewatch with Me: Anti-Fandom as Social Performance. In Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age, ed. Melissa Click, 62–80. NYU Press. Gray, Jonathan. 2019. How Do I Dislike Thee? Let Me Count the Ways. In Anti-­ Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age, ed. Melissa Click, 25–41. NYU Press. ———. 2021. Dislike-Minded: Media, Audiences, and the Dynamics of Taste. New York University Press. Grossberg, Lawrence. 1992. The Affective Sensibility of Fandom. In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis, 60–65. London: Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203181539. Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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Harris, Cheryl. 1998. A Sociology of Television Fandom. In Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture, and Identity, ed. Cheryl Harris and Alison Alexander. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Hills, Matt. 2002. Fan Cultures. Sussex Studies in Culture and Communication. London: Routledge. Iyengar, Shanto, Yphtach Lelkes, Matthew Levendusky, Neil Malhotra, and Sean J. Westwood. 2019. The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States. Annual Review of Political Science 22: 129–146. Jancovich, Mark. 2002. Cult Fictions: Cult Movies, Subcultural Capital and the Production of Cultural Distinctions. Cultural Studies 16 (2): 306–322. Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. Kimball, David C., Bryce Summary, and Eric C. Vorts. 2014. Political Identity and Party Polarization in the American Electorate. In The State of the Parties: The Changing Role of Contemporary American Parties, ed. John C. Green, Daniel J. Coffey, and David B. Cohen, 7th ed., 35–54. Rowman & Littlefield. Lancaster, Kurt. 2001. Interacting with Babylon 5: Fan Performances in a Media Universe. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. Naab, Teresa K., Dominique Heinbach, Marc Ziegele, and Marie-Theres Grasberger. 2020. Comments and Credibility: How Critical User Comments Decrease Perceived News Article Credibility. Journalism Studies 21 (6): 783–801. Nickerson, Raymond S. 1998. Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises. Review of General Psychology 2 (2): 175–220. https://doi. org/10.1037/1089-­2680.2.2.175. Papacharissi, Zizi. 2010. A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites. New York; London: Routledge. Sandvoss, Cornel. 2005. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2013. Toward an Understanding of Political Enthusiasm as Media Fandom: Blogging, Fan Productivity and Affect in American Politics. Participations 10 (1): 252–296. ———. 2019. The Politics of Against: Political Participation, Anti-Fandom and Populism. In Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age, ed. Melissa Click, 125–146. NYU Press. Sears, David. 1975. Political Socialization. In The Handbook of Political Science, ed. Fred I.  Greenstein and Nelson W.  Polsby. Addison-Wesley. https://doi. org/10.2307/1961518. Settle, Jaime E. 2018. Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America. Cambridge University Press.

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Stark, Luke. 2020. Empires of Feeling: Social Media and Emotive Politics. In Affective Politics of Digital Media: Propaganda by Other Means, ed. Megan Boler and Elizabeth Davis, 298–313. Routledge. Thrift, Nigel. 2008. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. Routledge. Wahl-Jorgensen, Karin. 2019. Emotions, Media and Politics. John Wiley & Sons.

CHAPTER 5

Can We Debate Away the Hate?

Introduction In September 2019, I was observing a discussion following an article shared by Fox News on Facebook. Like many of the comment threads that I was observing at that time, debate had quickly descended into self-­ proclaimed Trump supporters facing off against those with more Democratic Party leanings. However, what made this discussion different was a lone comment by Greg1 among the angry posts: “Want a place to debate intelligently with people of opposing views?” and a link to a closed Facebook group. A few days later, I was observing another discussion on a post shared by CNN, when I noticed the exact same comment by Greg. I would later learn that this was the recruitment strategy for a private Facebook group designed to gather those interested in politics, on both sides of the spectrum, to debate. A place where members could passionately discuss politics and, importantly, all the while hidden from family and friends. In October 2019, I joined The Group,2 that was created by Greg and his friend to, as The Group about page notes, “set up a public discourse for all members to intelligently take part in debating any and all ideas  Greg, as with all interviews. is a pseudonym for anonymity.  To help ensure participant anonymity and member privacy I have not used the group’s full name and instead refer to it as The Group. 1 2

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pertaining to a multitude of topics.” My formal observations of The Group took place from October 2019 until December 2020, including the intense lead up to, and the US presidential election. To track The Group’s progress, I remained a member of,  and continued to check updates, until November 2021. My observations were broken into two distinct periods. One in which I remained a ‘silent’ observer from October 2019–May 2020, where my presence was only known to the founder, Greg. This allowed for unobtrusive observation. In May 2020, I made my presence known to members and sought volunteers for interview. In total, I undertook 19 interviews with members from May to August, one with Greg the founder and 18 with members who volunteered (see the Methods Appendix). Interviewees completed a survey prior to interview that asked for details about engagement with news organisations, political affiliation and basic demographics. Interviews canvassed views on online political discussion and their behaviours. Drawing on this data, this chapter will examine this closed group as a case study of a space specifically set up to encourage healthy and robust online political discussion. It will examine its use of moderation, and the technological affordances of Facebook, to influence the discussion, along with the behaviours exhibited. Ultimately, it will argue that even in a space designed to facilitate ‘intelligent and quality’ debate, fan-like behaviours continue to initiate and sustain polarized debate. Given that The Group is dedicated to bringing those with differing political opinions together, this case study allows for the examination of the motivations and behaviours of a community which proclaims to want to have civil and productive political debate. Ultimately, however, I find that it is the fan-like attachments to a political perspective that shape participation in political debate.

The Group The Group’s self-proclaimed mission is to create a safe space for intelligent debate. As they note when you join: We know at times it can feel like an echo chamber if you’re surrounded by people who agree with you, and you may not have much exposure from intelligent opposing viewpoints by trolls who visit your favorite groups. The media can distort things and boil them down to simplistic talking points but we all know that’s for sensationalism and the issues are so much deeper than that. That’s the point of starting this group.

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Throughout the period of my observation, membership fluctuated from around 2,800 to 3,300 members. The peak was just prior to the 2020 presidential election, and dropped down to 3,100 by November 2021. Given the changing group make-up, administrators regularly polled users for political affiliation. Based on polls undertaken at the time of interviews (May and July 2020) 41% identified as Centre, 32% as Right, 22% as Left, 4% as Far Left and 1% as Far Right. (Administrators never gathered demographics such as gender, age, etc.) My sample included 6% very left-wing, 13% fairly left-wing, 24% slightly left-of-centre, 12% centre, 29% slightly right-of-centre, 10% fairly right-wing, 6% very right-wing. Members were recruited via comments following news articles shared by major US news outlets including Fox News and CNN and through invitation from existing members. For Greg and his co-founder, they wanted to create a space that they hadn’t found elsewhere online: Basically, like, I don’t know, we were both into political talk like on Facebook and it’s just always the same thing, everyone just starts insulting each other. If someone doesn’t agree with your point of view, then they just revert to pulling out the emotions and then insults. I don’t know and it’s difficult, but we wanted to create a space where we could see actual good discussion, like I don’t see why everyone has to start insulting each other, why can’t people just communicate like adults and it’s just better that way. So that was the whole idea behind it.3

Greg had attempted to join existing online political discussion groups but had found that they weren’t ‘safe’ spaces for debate. ‘I joined like 15 groups and I didn’t like the discussion. I didn’t like how it was an echo chamber and I didn’t like the way that people were talking, it’s like whoever could use the most profanity was better.’ The Group began in August 2019 and quickly became a space of passionate and emotive political debate that mainly focused on US politics, although occasionally global topics were debated. However, The Group’s aspirational goals appeared to be short lived. In February 2021, Greg announced that he would no longer be actively recruiting for The Group and pointed to a new public group on Facebook where he would be directing his energy. Interestingly, this public group only ever grew to a few hundred members during my observation period. By April 2021, 3  All excerpts from interviews and surveys have been provided in italics and indented for ease of identification.

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Greg’s friend and one of the founders, left The Group, feeling that the debate had regressed. Over the course of the next few weeks, The Group was archived, then put back live again numerous times, with only some moderators remaining when it finally remained. By November 2021, The Group remained static at 3,100 members, but far fewer were active. Posts appeared every few days and still received some, but limited interaction with comments. However, without the active investment in keeping The Group balanced, it moved to more commentary and discussion driven by those with conservative or right-wing political affiliations. As such The Group provides an excellent case study of the evolution of community dedicated to online political discussion for the period in which it was ‘curated.’

Locating the Fan Following Sandvoss’ (2005) definition of fandom as “regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given narrative or text” (8), the regularity of engagement with The Group by many members suggests a fan-like attachment. Due to the moderation process (outlined below), The Group during its peak, posted, on average, three to five contributions a day, but as Greg notes ‘at peak times, you know, we’ll have 20 or 30 posts through, more than can possibly go live.’ Engagement with those posts was also high with between 50–100 comments per day, spiking at more than 300 on peak days around the US election. As those interviewed note, they visited The Group at least daily, sometimes several times a day to check the progress of a debate or discussion. At this most basic level, participating in The Group suggests enthusiastic political engagement as a form of fandom, which in turn drives political participation. In Sandvoss’ later work (2013) in which he examines political bloggers on The Daily Kos site, he argues for distinguishing the levels of productivity of users of the site based on a fan typology. Drawing on Fiske’s (1992) degrees of productivity, he argues those who were regular readers of the blog were fans as demonstrated through their semiotic productivity; those who regularly commented on the blogs demonstrated a fan-like enunciative productivity; and those who created their own blog posts were the most enthusiastic fans through their textual productivity. These three levels of investment are also demonstrated in The Group, with the majority of members regularly visiting The Group, but not commenting or creating posts. The next largest group are the regular commenters (weekly), around 185 of The Group membership

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and then regular posters represented only 32 of the membership. This relatively elite group of posters showed the highest level of investment in the site. Those that are textually productive follow group protocols for initiating debate. All posters are instructed to provide not just an opinion, but also a question to open debate. Those who create posts suggest they see great value in presenting their point of view, a point of view that they believe is often missing in media commentary. As Daisy, a 34–45-year-old fairly right-wing member, notes: I was drawn to it [The Group] to just be able to talk about the stuff that is missing in, you know, media. I feel like if we don’t talk about it and make people aware then no one will, now more than ever.

However, while this statement suggests engagement with The Group arises out of a lack of trust in the media, almost all posts use a link to a media article to elicit discussion and demonstrate a point. As shown in the example post below, posts generally outline an issue, the author’s point of view with a media article to substantiate this point, and a question for readers (Fig. 5.1). The use of media articles suggests an interesting dynamic for members of The Group. Members note they are driven to The Group as a space to initiate debate that they feel is lost or smothered by mainstream media, yet they rely on media articles as a claim to legitimacy in their stance or positioning on an issue. It could be argued that the use of news media in this way is a form of textual poaching (Jenkins 1992), similar to that associated with fans of popular culture. Just as fans can appropriate popular texts and rework them as fan art or fan fiction, posters on The Group are poaching the textual meaning of news media, appropriating these texts and rereading them in a fashion that suits their rhetorical purposes. Debate within The Group, then, can be fostered based on the range of permissible retellings of those texts. These retellings often align with values attributed to self-defined political perspectives. While regularity of engagement and a form of productivity is part of the spectrum of fan-like behaviours and ultimately fandom, affective investment in the fan object is also a central factor. Members demonstrate an affective investment in: politics broadly; The Group; as well as, their political perspective.

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Fig. 5.1  Facebook post with news article (Post edited to remove any identifying details. Permission provided)

I love politics and I love to talk about politics and it’s [The Group] a place where I can do that. I take politics seriously and I don’t like to do it [talk politics] in real life that much. It can be difficult and I don’t want to get into those situations. But in The Group I know that everyone else has as much interest as I do…. I love to be able to voice my opinion and then have others engage with that and comment on it and stuff… it’s important for me to have a place where I can share my thoughts. (Annika, 44–55 fairly left-wing)

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Annika displays a passion about her political engagement that is typical of many of the active contributors in The Group, to whom their engagement in the political process is an important aspect of their identity. However, it is not just politics generally that is important to identity performance within The Group. Here Chris (54–65, slightly right-of-­ centre) notes: I like to comment on things that reflect my values, the things that I am passionate about…. I guess my values would be seen as conservative and so there are topics that I feel I have to add to. To, you know, correct misinformation or just ensure that the full picture is given…. I can get emotional, I guess, but that’s because what I’m talking about is really important to me, and I believe to the country as well, so it’s important that I make my point.

Here Chris is suggesting an affective investment in performing his conservative values. He recognises the individuality of the values, but also his representation of them in political debate is important for the broader US society. It is his affective investment in his self-defined political perspective which drives his participation in politics. On a purely rhetorical level, affective investment in group members’ political perspective is also evident in the language use of posters and commenters, such as the frequent use of First and Third Person plural pronouns such as ‘us,’ ‘we,’ ‘our,’ ‘them and ‘they.’ In Sandvoss’ (2019) investigation of the affective foundations of the bond between political fans and their fan objects, he argues that an investment in a politician, party or political ideal is informed by a politics of against. Central to the affective bond is a delineation of an ‘us,’ those who represent the fan object of a political ideal, and ‘them,’ those who are opposing. “This interplay between fanlike activism in politics and the significance of an imagined Other, or what we can describe as an anti-fan object—a text or textual field (such as a politician, political party, or political cause) with which users regularly and emotively engage yet through strongly negative emotions—is reflective of the partisanship arising out of community memberships” (Sandvoss 2019, 131). Members of The Group are enacting this politics of against by framing their discussion points through the ‘us’ and ‘them’ rhetoric. It is here that the complexity of the fan-like behaviours on the site is apparent. Both the membership of The Group and enacting their identity of a person ‘who takes politics seriously’ is an important element of these

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members’ discursive identity construction, but so too is their particular political perspective. The significance of the emotional investments in each creates a dynamic that may reinforce polarized debate. Many note the difficulty of reaching a consensus in these debates, and as Susan (34–45 slightly right-of-centre) states, there is a frustration with never agreeing. Of course politics is important and having a say is important, but there’s still a need to have the other side listen. It can get annoying saying the same thing and having the same thing said back to you again and again. I’m not sure people are really wanting to have their mind changed or accept another point of view.

Then when asked what impact this would have, she notes: ‘I guess I’ll probably get sick of it and leave.’ Susan’s comments suggest while an affective investment in the site and by extension politics overall helps drive political participation, ultimately the need to defend and perform a particular political perspective could drive users away. There is a conflict between a desire to be politically engaged, but also to have one’s position or views ‘heard’ and by extension accepted as true or right. This suggests that polarization, even with the best of intentions of group participants, could be inevitable.

Moderation and the Importance of Policing Moderation has become one of the key tactics for the setting of group norms, tackling online incivility, and trying to maintain productive debate. Within the news industry, moderation is undertaken, in most cases reluctantly by journalists (Diakopoulos and Naaman 2011; Reich 2011). Moderation can also be conducted by specialist companies, or in Facebook’s case, by outsourced, low-paid labour (Gillespie 2010). In community and private user-driven groups, like The Group, this moderation is taken on by members of the community (Gibson 2019). Studies find that the mere presence of moderation can impact on a discussion’s quality within a normative deliberative model (Frischlich et al. 2019). Numerous studies of journalistic moderation both on news websites and social media find that moderation can be undertaken by conducting pre- or post-moderation, limiting discussion topics or closing discussion on certain topics, removing or altering comments or removing users who break the rules (Singer et al. 2011; Reich 2011; Ruiz et al. 2011). Others

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discuss more proactive moderation by engaging in the dialogue to model preferred behaviour and keep discussion on topic (Ihlebæk and Krumsvik 2015). The Group operates on a pre-moderation model. Each post is submitted to the team of 10 moderators for consideration, at least 3 must vote to approve a post. Likewise, if 3 decline, then it will not be posted. Gillespie (2010) argues that no moderator is ever neutral, and all moderation requires value-based judgments. In the case of The Group, neutrality is aimed for by ensuring a mix of political perspectives within the moderating team. Greg notes, ‘the key is you have to have your moderators left and right, you can’t have a group of all right-wing moderators, that doesn’t work.’ Moderators are selected from within The Group. While ensuring a mix of political perspectives is key, Greg also looks for regulars who post ‘intelligently’ and ‘can hold their own without insulting people.” Then these moderators enforce the rules, but also model the appropriate behaviour for The Group. ‘Once you become a moderator you can’t really partake too much, you have to uphold a certain standard, a new standard.’ In this way, moderators are undertaking the three core functions of moderation: strategically shaping the boundaries, conditioning the group’s behaviours and processing and enforcing rules (Edwards 2002). The standards that the moderators must model and police are outlined in The Group rules. When a member joins The Group they are asked to indicate that they agree to abide by these rules. They are also listed in the ‘About’ section. The rules are: 1. No personal attacks or threats Personal threats or attacks are strictly prohibited. No name calling or negative personal insults specifically to members. No harassment of members. We want civil dialogue; not trolls. 2. No self-promotion or links to other groups Give more than you take from this group. Self-promotion and links to other groups aren’t allowed. This will result in an immediate ban from the group. 3. Be classy (most of the time) Debate can spark emotion however give respect to people. Attack ideas and actions rather than their integrity, age, nationality, sex, race, sexual orientation or details from a member’s Facebook profile. 4. Provide your own thoughts to start a new post

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When posting new content please include a description of your topic, your stance, and a debatable question to accompany an article. Thought provoking debate requires a well articulated foundation. 5. Warnings and reminders are discretionary Mods may opt to vote for a discretionary 12 hr mute for minor offenses. This will not count towards the 3 strike rule ban, and can not be applied more than once in 60 days. Mute or a ban for mod bullying is at the discretion of the team. 6. 3 Strikes Rule The 1st rule break will earn a 24 hr mute, a 2nd violation will be a 3 day mute. A 3rd violation will result in a ban and block from the group. Every mute expires from your record in 90 days. The Group operates under several principles of moderation, including rules for behaviour such as no personal attacks, promotion of other groups and ‘be classy.’ Of note is that being classy does not suggest that emotion is not allowed in debate, instead it points to the “attack of ideas” rather than individuals. This suggests a recognition of the role of the emotional in political engagement that has increasingly become vital in contemporary mediated politics (Wahl-Jorgensen 2019). As noted previously in this chapter, members are also asked to structure their prompts for debate in a specific way to ensure debate that is ‘well articulated’ and ‘thought provoking.’ Finally, the rules outline the punishments for users who do not uphold The Group values. “Transparency, in particular, is an important aspect with regard to incivility and moderation in both a technological and performative sense, because transparency provides users necessary insights into, and knowledge about, how boundaries are set in public debates. As a result, users are given the chance to learn from and adjust to—or resist and reject—this kind of control” (Kalsnes and Ihlebæk 2021, n.p.). For Greg, these rules and their quick enforcement, are essential for creating effective debate. We’ve created a system that will eventually weed out the types of people that will talk like that, nasty like, because it’s impossible to know how someone’s going to be before you invite them to a group. So, no matter how hard you try you’re going to get those people that are like that, the awful people but what we did is we have a team of moderators that are active and we have a system in place where it’s a warning system and on the third strike you’re out. So, the types of people that exhibit that behaviour they only last so long ‘cause people report like crazy. Every day we probably get maybe 20 to 50 reports.

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Community Life Cycle Kim’s (2000) much-cited method for evaluating online communities is based on a life cycle that is developed through successive stages of community involvement. In practice this works through involvement as it relates to a membership type: 1. Visitors: people without an established identity in the community 2. Novices: new members who are learning the norms and values of the group 3. Regulars: established members who are comfortable and participating regularly in the community 4. Leaders: volunteers who keep the community running 5. Elders: long-time regulars who share knowledge and help demonstrate as well as informally monitor community norms and values Under Kim’s membership model, an online community member’s identity evolves over time, allowing them to move through the membership types. In line with Kim’s (2000) model, visitors and novices are initiated into the boundaries of discussion through the rules and their policing. It is in this stage of the life cycle that many members are removed. During the interview period, Greg estimated at least one to two users a day were removed from The Group. It’s mainly the people that we don’t want. I mean I do lose people. I’m a pretty good people person and if someone messages me which happens often like I’ll work with them and I’ll try and explain so use the block function if someone’s always being an arsehole to you and things like that but no, I think mainly the people that we lose are people we’re booting out and it’s a lot of people. I mean like I said it’s about quality over quantity, I don’t care about the number, I care about the content so I’ll boot people very quickly if they’re doing all that negative nonsense.

The moderators of The Group operate as leaders (Kim 2000), providing support by answering questions, hosting community activities (e.g. providing regular polls and other content) and policing membership by removing content and punishing behaviour that contravenes The Group’s rules. Those who occupy the ‘elder’ role are often asked to take on a Leader role as a ‘reward’ for their engagement within The Group, further reinforcing their group identity in the hierarchy. As Tharon (2018) notes,

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Kim’s model has evolved so that often ‘elders’ are considered to be those who are gradually leaving the community because they don’t like the direction the community has gone. However, creating policies and practices that “celebrate the contributions of ‘elders’ in the community can dramatically enhance the sustainability of the community” (Tharon 2018, 815). So, the regular ‘guest’ moderator spot provided to ‘elders’ within The Group would seem to stem some of the attrition associated with natural online community life cycles. However, as noted previously, an inability to change minds or move discussion to consensus could eventually lead to ‘elder’ loss. Just as Chin (2018) argues that fandom works on the accumulation of Bourdieun “capitals” (244) or a “set of actually usable resources and powers” (Bourdieu 1984, 114), so too does membership of The Group. Chin argues that fans’ use of social media to congregate and discuss their object of fandom is driven by notions of presence and influence. Or as Hills (2002) notes, fan communities reflect social hierarchies where fans “compete over fan knowledge, access to the fan object and status” (46). Status within the field of a particular fandom is earned through the accumulation of cultural, social and, ultimately, symbolic capital. Cultural capital is earned through access to and knowledge of the fan object, social capital is the fan’s social network and the communities that they belong to, while symbolic capital is the fans’ reputation and prestige within their fandom. The field of exchange for these capitals, when it relates to fandom, is the restricted field of fan production, which includes items of fan production such as fanfiction, but also any social media updates related to the fan object (Chin 2018). Within The Group, the principles of moderation are based on the exchange of these capitals. Members who demonstrate particular access to knowledge, or access to politics through, for example, the ability to attend a Trump rally, or an intimate knowledge of the news media, accumulate cultural capital within The Group. These posts are often ‘rewarded’ with high numbers of engagement through comments. This social capital results in elevation to the moderator team, enabling access to this elite community, and symbolic capital results from the recognition and reputation that comes with elevation to this group and recognition of contributions that fit within the boundaries defined by group norms and values. Key to the success of this model is a reliance on a form of a gift economy, whereby moderators must give their time to creating a space for a

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productive discussion as a gift in exchange for status, rather than monetary reward. Matias (2019) describes the role of volunteer moderators as “civic labour” (n.p.) where their authority is defined through negotiations with commercial, civic and peer stakeholders. By this, he means that they must satisfy the platform, their communities and their fellow moderators. “Because moderation is governance as well as labor, its legitimacy depends on the beliefs of people other than the moderators who create and enforce policies. Consequently, the processes that shape the meaning of moderation also define its power” (Matias 2019, 2). The constant push and pull between these three parties can result in what Greg terms ‘burn out’ for the moderators. They must deal with disagreements within the moderator group, often based on political lines, as well as claims from members of censorship and unfair punishments. An additional pressure can come from changing Facebook policies that moderators need to adapt to. ‘It can be a tough gig and some aren’t cut out for it or can even be a little too invested in it,’ says Greg. He notes that it was the disputes between moderators and complaints from members that ultimately drove moderators from the site. These were the issues which lead to his friend, and other original founder, leaving The Group and its withering following the removal of active recruitment and curation. The affective investment of the moderators then is a foundation of the community existence, but can also lead to the breakdown of the very system looking to sustain the community. To be an active member of The Group that is ultimately elevated to the role of moderator, you must post regularly in a way that fits within the boundaries defined by group norms and values. All posts need to be designed to elicit discussion through a clearly stated opinion which is a firm indication of a political perspective. Therefore, those elevated to moderators would be exhibiting not only a high level of affective investment in the site as regular commenters, but also in their own political perspective. It is this investment in their own political perspective which can conflict with that of The Group and lead to disagreements based on ideological lines. The fan-like behaviours of members, then, help drive productive activity, but ultimately stymie debate. Affective investment in a political perspective means there is limited opportunity to move debate to consensus ensuring that conflict will result.

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Disembedding as a Participatory Practice One of the key factors for both the page administrators and those engaged with The Group is the ability to compartmentalise their political engagement and identity from their everyday lives. The ‘About’ section of The Group specifically points out that members should: “Know that anything you post here will be kept hidden from your other friends and that was done intentionally.” Contrary to the contemporary scholarly approaches that examine use of digital technologies as enmeshed or embedded in everyday life, Gerrard (2017) argues that some fans use technological affordances of social media to separate fandom from other parts of their lives. Gerrard (2017) proposes “disembeddeding as a nuanced practice whereby fans position their identities on a scale between two imagined states: who they are online versus who they are in their real lives” (n.p.). Unlike Gerrard’s teen drama fans, not all of those interviewed where constructing secret fan identities (although some were using pseudonyms across their Facebook use for other reasons), they were working to “compartmentalise” (Dhoest and Szulc 2016, 9) their passionate political identities from their networks’ strong ties (Granovetter 1973). For many members of The Group, it was not that they have ‘different’ identities with friends and family and other strong ties in their networks, but rather that they could play out their passionate commitment to particular political ideals, positions and affiliations: in essence it is a space where they could enact fan-like behaviours. I just don’t talk about politics with friends and family. I don’t want things to get tense. It can be difficult and, I don’t know, I think I just figure it is better not to talk about it. Keep the peace sort of thing (Ben, 24–35, centralist)

Even founder Greg (who identifies as slightly right-of-centre) doesn’t like to discuss politics in ‘real life.’ I think I learnt quite early that you just don’t do that. Things can get ugly or you can annoy people. So I tend to avoid it.

So, the ability to compartmentalise and hide their political discussion from friends and family is seen as a benefit of The Group for members. They are enacting a form of what Ellison et al. (2016) describe as “selective anonymity” where they are purposefully hiding some interactions

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from their broader network. The distinction here is that within The Group in which the ‘hidden interactions’ take place, identity and community are built, but carefully hidden away from other networks. Relationships (and their breakdowns) within the hidden interaction communities—like The Group— can be as important and powerful as those with traditional strong ties or close family and friends, and, therefore, have equally profound impacts. Given that these hidden interactions can only take place within the bounds of social media platforms, group dynamics can be exacerbated, however. As Settle (2018) finds, the core features of social media platforms reinforced social and political identities, along with biased information processing. She argues that Facebook features such as the ubiquity of social feedback, the ability to easily infer other users’ political identity and the incentives to provide inflammatory content to elicit comments have a direct impact on the aggregate level of psychological polarization. All of these factors are at play in The Group. The purpose of The Group is discussion and feedback, and in fact users are rewarded for high levels of interaction through allocation of capital, ensuring content is at least controversial if not inflammatory. It is encouraged to make clear one’s own political position, but even if this is not explicit, comments following these posts show that a core evaluation of their value is based on the commenter’s perception of the poster’s political identity. For example: “of course a Democrat would think that,” “the right side of politics always….” As Settle (2018) notes, an increase in the perceived differences between individuals’ own position and where they perceive the ‘other’ to be, makes political and social identities more aligned, and contributes to the stereotyping (and negative evaluations) of those with differing views. Therefore, relegation of political discussion to an entirely Facebook space can only increase overall polarization in those who are highly politically engaged. This suggests that while The Group sets out to be the place to bring both sides together to intelligently debate, its use of social media to manage this may be negating its very purpose. Of course, hiding one’s intense participation in online discussion is also linked to already circulating discourses (Gerrard 2017). The old adage ‘Don’t Read The Comments’ not only warns against silently observing online discussion with its rampant abuse and derogatory comments, but also derides those who may seek to take part or, even shockingly, take pleasure from joining online discussion. As Crystal Abidin et al. (2020) note, mocking comment sections has become an internet genre in and of

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itself. Therefore, those who take part in groups like The Group may value the ability to hide this interaction as it allows them to separate their political identities from strong network ties, but also avoid cultural derision for a desire to actively participate in online discussion. Hiding interaction runs contra to the celebration of authenticity advocated for and in some cases enforced by social media platforms through policies and technological affordances, but as Light (2014) argues in his research on those who disconnect from social media, either by choice or because they have been banned, these users are enacting disconnective practices. Users aren’t entirely bound by technology, but make decisions to enact practices that facilitate deliberate connection and disconnection. For members of The Group, disconnective practices are used to quarantine their enthusiastic, fan-like productivity. As outlined here, an important element of The Group is the ability to provide members with a method to hide their passionate interest and participation in online political discussion. By participating in The Group, members are able to compartmentalise their passionate political identities. However, even though The Group has brought together those who share a passionate interest in politics and the discussion thereof, polarization appears to still be reinforced through performance and investment in political perspectives and ultimately leads to breakdowns in relationships and community within The Group.

Conclusion The Group’s lofty goal of bringing together those with differing political perspectives and identities to “intelligently” debate, is something aspired to by most who are concerned by what appears to be irreparable fractions and fissures in modern society. But as outlined here, while The Group has many positive aspects for members, it also provides an excellent example of how fan-like behaviours continue to initiate and sustain polarized debate. Just as Hills (2002) notes, fan communities reflect social hierarchies where fans “compete over fan knowledge, access to the fan object and status,” so too do members of The Group. Members are encouraged to write posts in a way that encourages intense discussion and debate and the moderation system works to reward those who are actively engaged with the status of becoming a guest moderator. This recognition of the community “elder” (Kim 2000) should help stymie the natural life cycle of the community, where those elders are actually those that are gradually

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leaving the community because they don’t like the direction the community has gone (Tharon 2018). However, some interviewees suggest that the inability to change minds or move discussion to consensus is something that may ultimately drive them from The Group. This suggests that while The Group may have strategic moderation practices to enhance community development, ultimately, fan-like investment in a political identity and perspective continue to drive polarization. All those interviewed have a passionate investment in The Group as a community, but their political passions are often at odds with this, creating a powder keg for conflict. The process of compartmentalising political identity and participation in passionate political discussion, while seen as a benefit by members, still poses issues for polarization. Drawing from Settle’s (2018) work that examines how the specific features of Facebook reinforce polarization, The Group may be entrenching a perception of distance between opposing perspectives. Ultimately, for those actively engaged in The Group, fan-like attachments to political ideals shape participation in political debate and ultimately ensure entrenched polarization. In the next chapter, we continue to examine polarization in online political discussion on Facebook; however we move focus to the phenomenon of ‘fake news’ and how the fake news label is used as a tool of distinction in political debate.

References Abidin, Crystal, Emily van der Nagel, Amelia Johns, Francesco Bailo, Aleesha Rodriguez, Bondy Valdovinos-Kaye, Patrik Wikstrom, Ysabel Gerrard, and Tama Leaver. 2020. ‘Please Read the Comments’: Commenting Cultures Across Platforms. AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research. https://doi. org/10.5210/fm.v22i8.7877. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chin, Bertha. 2018. It’s About Who You Know. In A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies, Wiley Blackwell Companions in Cultural Studies, ed. Paul Booth, 243–255. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley Blackwell. https://doi. org/10.1002/9781119237211.ch15. Dhoest, Alexander, and Lukasz Szulc. 2016. Navigating Online Selves: Social, Cultural, and Material Contexts of Social Media Use by Diasporic Gay Men. Social Media+ Society 2 (4). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116672485.

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Diakopoulos, Nicholas, and Mor Naaman. 2011. Towards Quality Discourse in Online News Comments. In Proceedings of the ACM 2011 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 133–42. ACM. Edwards, Arthur R. 2002. The Moderator as an Emerging Democratic Intermediary: The Role of the Moderator in Internet Discussions about Public Issues. Information Polity 7 (1): 3–20. Ellison, Nicole B, Lindsay Blackwell, Cliff Lampe, and Penny Trieu. 2016. ‘The Question Exists, but You Don’t Exist with It’: Strategic Anonymity in the Social Lives of Adolescents. Social Media+ Society 2 (4). https://doi. org/10.1177/2056305116670673. Fiske, John. 1992. The Cultural Economy of Fandom. In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis, 30–49. London: Routledge. Frischlich, Lena, Svenja Boberg, and Thorsten Quandt. 2019. Comment Sections as Targets of Dark Participation? Journalists’ Evaluation and Moderation of Deviant User Comments. Journalism Studies 20 (14): 2014–2033. Gerrard, Ysabel. 2017. ‘It’s a Secret Thing’: Digital Disembedding through Online Teen Drama Fandom. First Monday. Gibson, Anna. 2019. Free Speech and Safe Spaces: How Moderation Policies Shape Online Discussion Spaces. Social Media+ Society 5 (1). https://doi. org/10.1177/2056305119832588 Gillespie, Tarleton. 2010. The Politics of ‘Platforms’. New Media & Society 12 (3): 347–364. Granovetter, Mark S. 1973. The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology 78: 1360–1380. Hills, Matt. 2002. Fan Cultures. Sussex Studies in Culture and Communication. London: Routledge. Ihlebæk, Karoline Andrea, and Arne H.  Krumsvik. 2015. Editorial Power and Public Participation in Online Newspapers. Journalism 16 (4): 470–487. Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. Kalsnes, Bente, and Karoline Andrea Ihlebæk. 2021. Hiding Hate Speech: Political Moderation on Facebook. Media, Culture & Society 43 (2): 326–342. Kim, Amy Jo. 2000. Community Building on the Web, On the Web Series. Peachpit Press. Light, Ben. 2014. Disconnecting with Social Networking Sites. Springer. Matias, J. Nathan. 2019. The Civic Labor of Volunteer Moderators Online. Social Media+ Society 5 (2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119836778 Reich, Zvi. 2011. User Comments: The Transformation of Participatory Space. In Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers, ed. Jane B. Singer, David Domingo, Ari Heinonen, Alfred Hermida, Steve Paulussen, Thorsten Quandt, Zvi Reich, and Marina Vujnovic, 96–117. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons.

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Ruiz, Carlos, David Domingo, Josep Lluís Micó, Javier Díaz-Noci, Koldo Meso, and Pere Masip. 2011. Public Sphere 2.0? The Democratic Qualities of Citizen Debates in Online Newspapers. The International Journal of Press/Politics 16 (4): 463–487. Sandvoss, Cornel. 2005. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2013. Toward an Understanding of Political Enthusiasm as Media Fandom: Blogging, Fan Productivity and Affect in American Politics. Participations.Org. https://www.participations.org/Volume%2010/Issue%20 1/12a%20Sandvoss%2010%201.pdf. ———. 2019. The Politics of Against: Political Participation, Anti-Fandom and Populism. In Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age, ed. Melissa Click, 125–146. NYU Press. Settle, Jaime E. 2018. Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America. Cambridge University Press. Singer, Jane B., David Domingo, Ari Heinonen, Alfred Hermida, Steve Paulussen, Thorsten Quandt, Zvi Reich, and Marina Vujnovic. 2011. Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers. John Wiley & Sons. Tharon, Howard. 2018. The Viability of Online Communities and Virtual Teams for Enterprise Clients. In The Wiley Handbook of Human Computer Interaction Set, ed. Kent L.  Norman and Jurek Kirakowski, 803–820. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley Blackwell. Wahl-Jorgensen, Karin. 2019. Emotions. Media and Politics: John Wiley & Sons.

CHAPTER 6

‘Fake news,’ Polarization and Fan-like Behaviours

Introduction In 2017 the Collins Dictionary announced fake news the ‘word’ (or perhaps it should have been phrase) of the year. Then in 2021, Macquarie Dictionary followed up by naming it the ‘word’ of the decade. Fake news has permeated the zeitgeist as a catch-all for any information that one doesn’t believe or as I will argue in this chapter, wish to believe. As a result, fake news has received increasing scholarly attention, however, the majority of this research has focused on fake news as a genre, or the deliberate creation of pseudojournalistic disinformation. The phenomenon of the fake news label, describing the political instrumentalisation of the term to delegitimise news media, remains chronically understudied (Egelhofer and Lecheler 2019). As Tracey (34–45, fairly left-wing) notes so astutely in her interview: Fake news is an interesting question. I mean, I like to think I just know it when I see it. But that’s the problem isn’t it? Basing your judgment on a gut feeling rather than fact.1

In contemporary times, no one popularised the term fake news more than US president Donald Trump. His presidency was characterised by 1  All excerpts from interviews and surveys have been provided in italics and indented for ease of identification.

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constant use of the fake news label as a way to deflect unfavourable news media coverage. The term is so popularised now that ordinary news users view fact checking as a core part of news consumption (Nelson and Lewis 2021). However, what also became apparent in the interviews with those involved in online political discussion was that the fake news label became a way of distinguishing one’s fan-like affiliation with a political perspective. In short, use of information sources and the refuting of sources used by others within discussion was an essential part of performing political identity. What follows in this chapter is an overview of the themes that emerged in relation to fake news, polarized online discussion and fandom. The themes were drawn from interviews with Australians involved in online political discussions and open responses to a survey with US and Australian news commenters. As outlined in the Methods Appendix, the role of the fake news label in online political discussion became apparent in the observation phase and interviews (n = 22), and as a result, specific open questions canvassing how participants determine what is false information and how they determine what is a reputable news source were added to the survey. Interview participants were Australian news consumers observed involved in polarized debate following a news story shared by ABC News or News.com.au on Facebook during the period of November 2019–July 2020. Questions focused on commenting behaviours, news consumption and involvement in political activities on- and offline. The survey (n = 306) was undertaken during July 2021 with 156 respondents from Australia and 150 for the United States. The respondents reflect a good range of self-nominated political affiliations, but do not reflect exact breakdowns in previous national elections in either country. Following convention, interviewees have been given pseudonyms to protect their identity and survey respondents assigned a number. To examine the role of fake news as a label in polarization and online political discussion, this chapter will proceed by first outlining the conflation of the term fake news with misinformation and disinformation, before broadly outlining the history of these terms. I will then outline the key themes that emerged in my analysis of the interviews and survey responses: the affective interpretation and evaluation of information, and the role of othering, and performance of identity.

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What Is Fake News? Wardle and Derakhshan (2017) argue that an appropriate understanding of the fake news phenomenon requires us to examine the ecosystem it exists within, which they label the “information disorder.” Within the information disorder there are three levels of information that are based on a spectrum of truthfulness to intention to harm (Wardle and Derakhshan 2017, 954). These three categories include: misinformation, or content that may be false but not intended to harm. It may be shared unintentionally. Next is disinformation, which is false and intended to harm and includes malicious rumours, and fabricated content and manipulation campaigns, such as created conspiracy theories. Finally, truthful information which is intended to harm is categorised as malinformation. Examples of this include publication of private details or deliberate change of context of genuine content. Interestingly, some scholars argue that the term fake news is in itself problematic. In the UK, for example, government policy bans the use of fake news in official documents and communication arguing that it is “a poorly-defined and misleading term that conflates a variety of false information, from genuine error through to foreign interference in democratic processes” (Murphy 2018 para. 2, cited in Tandoc 2019). However, it is this confusion over the term that informs its use in online political discussion and accordingly makes it so useful for this study. The most useful way for understanding the term fake news, as it relates to participants experiences in this study, is distinguishing the broad understanding of fake news as both a label used to undermine journalistic authority and a genre of disinformation presented in a journalistic format created intentionally to deceive (Egelhofer and Lecheler 2019; Tandoc 2019). Given that fake news as a label is in fact a weaponised term, it is specifically this definition which is of use in the following chapter. As I will outline later in this chapter, how participants perceive information and how they choose what information to provide in a discussion are deeply connected to the performance of their political identity. The use of the fake news label as a tactic of debate and the notions of what constitutes fake news offer a method for negotiating and reinforcing political identity. As Wardle and Derakhshan (2017) note “we ought to be asking the questions …. Are users accepting the messages as designed? Are they challenging certain parts of a message or dismissing it entirely? If we examine how messages are ‘reshared,’ we

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gain insight into how people make sense of particular messages” (956). I argue that people’s fan-like affective investment in an identity informs how they interpret information and share it.

Media Trust and the Fake News Label The rise in concern regarding the fake news phenomenon has been intertwined with low rates of trust in news media. Exposure to sources of fake news have been linked to declining levels of trust in media, with these negative media effects influencing individuals’ perceptions and behavioural outcomes (Ognyanova et  al. 2020; Cheng and Chen 2020). Egelhofer and Lecheler (2019) go even further linking an increase in false information to a public trust crisis, arguing that fake news has a negative influence upon citizens’ perceptions of media in general. The Australian 2021 digital news report (Park et al. 2021) shows that 43% of Australians say they trust news. However, this drops to 31% for news found via search engines and 18% for that found on social media. Americans reported even lower trust in the news media overall (29%) with only 22% for news sourced through search engines and 13% for news on social media (Jenkins and Graves 2021). Across most nations, trust in media has been in decline over the past five years to 2019 (Ipsos 2019); however, there was a slight bump in news trust during the pandemic for Australian news consumers (Park et al. 2021). Of note is that for Americans a lack of trust in journalism can be associated with political affiliation, with 69% of Democrats saying they trusted the news media in 2019, while that number was only 15% for Republicans (Brenan 2019). Of course, the use of disinformation and fake news is not new (Kuo and Marwick 2021). While it may be “tied inextricably to social media and technology platforms, and often curiously depoliticized, framed as ‘polluting’ or ‘infecting’ an otherwise healthy information ecosystem” (Kuo and Marwick 2021, n.p.), contemporary disinformation narratives build on pre-existing ideologies, particularly those involving race and inequality (Freelon et  al. 2020; Nkonde et  al. 2021). Indeed, journalist Walter Lippmann’s (1922) book Public Opinion, published in 1922, tackles the idea of propaganda, the media and the public’s creation of “stereotypes.” He outlines how engaging with information is about developing a feeling about an event that we don’t experience. That feeling is aroused through the mental image of that event. He further outlines the “manufacture of consent” enabled by propaganda and the mass media helped us to create

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the “stereotypes” we use to make decisions about politics. In other words, he articulates a concern about distorted reporting and the distorted perception of public affairs. Scholars interested in the traction and spreadability of disinformation and fake news find that people’s approach to and trust in news is dependent on their own self-perceptions (Nelson and Lewis 2021). By drawing on the concept of folk theories, Nelson and Lewis (2021) find that people’s understanding and trust in the news media is closely linked to the stories they tell themselves about media more generally (Toff and Nielsen 2018). However, they also find that it is their self-perception of their ability to tell fact from fiction that drives their trust in news sources. Audiences may therefore uphold their own self-conception as critical thinkers, which allows them to disregard news they might disagree with, ironically under the pretense of ‘fact-checking’ those stories and sources. Consequently, instead of the verification process leading audience members to recognize that journalists are indeed engaged in good-faith fact-finding, it reinforces for these people why journalists cannot be trusted. (Nelson and Lewis 2021, 16)

The link, then, between media trust and our self-perceptions offers much to examining how the fake news label is used in online political discussion. Examining how an individual decides what evidence or news articles to use in a debate, along with how they evaluate the information provided by others needs to be examined, not based on what that information is, but on how a person relates to it.

The Role of Social Media The technological affordances of social media have had a tremendous impact on how we interpret and share information. Some scholars find that those who spend more time on Facebook will engage more with fake news (Nelson and Taneja 2018), while others suggest that users unintentionally spread false information out of an intention to provide humour to others or show concern to their family or friends (Tandoc et al. 2018). So, while understanding fake news as historic and deeply entrenched in existing ideologies (Kuo and Marwick 2021), we must also examine the specific contemporary conditions that have made the phenomenon so pervasive.

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There are numerous factors that have driven the contemporary preoccupation with fake news. Social media, through its ability to enable easy creation and sharing of content to many instantly has created the means of spreading false information quickly. However, fake news is also powered by the appeal it provides to partisanship (Mourão and Robertson 2019) and repeated exposure facilitated through internet bots and users who share the information (Vosoughi et al. 2018). In response to both the real and perceived threat of fake news, users are increasingly turning to fact checking (Nelson and Lewis 2021), but research suggests only those with higher levels of cognitive ability will be swayed by corrections (Bode and Vraga 2018; De keersmaecker and Roets 2017; Graves and Cherubini 2016; Nyhan and Reifler 2010). Additionally, very few will take steps to correct the misinformation or disinformation that they see online (Tandoc 2017). A way to explain why fake news continues to be both believed and shared is confirmation bias, or the process of finding information that supports our pre-existing beliefs as more persuasive than information that doesn’t support or contradicts what we believe (Lazer et al. 2018). The theory of confirmation bias is closely linked to the theses underpinning the concepts of filter bubbles (Pariser 2011) and echo chambers (Sunstein 2001) where individuals, either through choice or the technological affordances of social networks, news aggregators and search engines are only exposed to conforming opinions. Research examining the prevalence of confirmation bias is generally informed by one of two approaches. The first is based on cognitive dissonance theory and focuses on whether media users prefer content that is consistent with their attitude over attitude-­ contradictory messages (Knobloch-Westerwick et  al. 2020; Knobloch-­ Westerwick 2015). The second is rooted in social identity theory and suggests that media users prefer messages that present their in-group in a favourable light. (Knobloch-Westerwick et al. 2020). However, as noted in Chap. 1, many argue (see Bruns 2019) that, in fact, social media enhance access to diverse opinions. Even the online audiences of sites such as Fox News and MSNBC are consistent with the ideological distribution of the overall online audience (about 30% conservative, 50% centralists and 20% liberal) suggesting that leading “political news sites attract ideologically diverse audiences regardless of their political slant” (Nelson and Webster 2017, 2). Pennycook and Rand (2019) find users devoid of analytic thinking skills are more likely  to believe in fake news rather than an innate

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confirmation bias. They note that those with higher analytical skills were “better able to discern real from fake news regardless of their political ideology” (Pennycook and Rand 2019, 9). The authors, therefore, argue that individuals fall for fake news because “they fail to think” (Pennycook and Rand 2019, 10). Others (Knobloch-Westerwick et al. 2020) suggest that news consumers have a stronger confirmation bias for attitude-­ consistent messaging when selecting news sources. Additionally, the researchers find “participants who tended to contrast themselves with others more through social comparisons showed a stronger confirmation bias. They may feel more challenged by the notion that another group may be right about a political issue” (Knobloch-Westerwick et  al. 2020, 118). However, the researchers did not find a strong in-group bias based on national identity. Drawing on previous work (see Appiah et  al. 2013; Knobloch-Westerwick and Hastall 2010), the authors surmise that low-­ status groups are more likely to exhibit in-group confirmation bias. So how, then, can we explain the belief in and sharing of fake news and its role in polarization? Drawing on the interview and survey data, I will now argue that the phenomenon of fake news has a role in polarization in two important ways: If we understand an individual’s investment in their political identity as fan-like, then that affective investment informs how they interpret the information they find and share. Secondly, the use of the fake news label is a discursive tactic of performance in online political discussion to distinguish from, and denigrate, the perceived other.

Affective Interpretation of Information Fandom is anchored in an affective investment in the fan object and it is this investment that drives a fan’s participatory behaviours. Likewise, behaviours in online political discussion can be understood in this way and in particular the affective interpretation of evidence and sources within debate. Many survey participants were very clear about the role that emotion played in their evaluation process. When asked how they determine what information is false, these survey participants remark: Feeling, instinct, intutition [sic]. If I sense something off I will comment accordingly. (56) (American, 35–44, male, centralist)

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Just a gut feeling when it all doesnt [sic]add up to be honest, You have to trust your instinct, i kind go with my heart, I don’t have a particular method, I go by what resonates in ‘my gut’, I mean how do you find out fake news. The issue with online news is that it’s hard to track credibility (278) (Australian, 55–64, female, very left-wing) A combination of common sense and a gut feeling. (263) (American, 56–75, male, slightly right-of-centre) They report verifiable news, ie: 1): News can be verified with independent and unaffiliated sources. 2): News that is consistent with what I already feel to be true (13) (American, 45–54, male, centralist) I can tell pretty easily from knowing in my gut (55) (Australian, 18–24, female, fairly right-wing) Instinct—common sense. If it’s right winged I don’t trust it (12) (American, 55–64, female, fairly right-wing)

These survey participants have faith in their feelings or instinct. They may not be swayed by factual integrity, but what they ‘feel’ to be true, or in participant 55’s case, ‘knowing in my gut.’ As participant 278 notes, this could be because they feel it is impossible to accurately determine truth or credibility so they must rely on their feelings. Samantha, a 55–64-year-old who self nominates as slightly right-of-centre, suggests it is the feelings generated from information shared in online public discussion that initiates her participation: Sometimes someone will share something and you just can tell, I mean you just you know, know it in your gut that it’s fake news… I just call them on it. I mean you just have to and I guess hope that others reading it will see that and know too [that it’s fake news].

Samantha’s participation, as she outlines it, in online political discussion, is an affective practice, that is inspired by the emotional evaluation of information shared by others. Her desire to ‘call it’ becomes a discursive practice of separating herself from those sharing this information, and by applying the fake news label she hopes to mitigate their opinion. Overall, participants suggest that evaluation of information or news articles is not solely driven by a rational and objective assessment of fact but is also driven by feelings. In this way interaction with and the appraisal of information is an affective practice. This evaluation can then inform a

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further affective practice of commenting and applying the fake news label to distinguish oneself from others.

Politics of Against and Fake News The evaluation of information was also closely linked with one’s investment in their political perspective. Participants in the survey and interviews suggest that they judge information on a framework of ‘against,’ rather than its perceived factual veracity. For example, as these survey respondents note in an open question about how they evaluate information used in online political discussions: If liberal then its false (45) (American, 55–64, female, fairly right-wing) If Republican false, Fox News false. It’s simple (12) (American, 55–64, fairly left-wing) I pay attention to the headline and if comes from a democrat it is always untrue (90) (American, 55–64, male, very right-wing) If they are liberal it’s fake news and NOT to be believed and NOT good for America!! (102) (American, 65–74, male, very right-wing)

These commenters equate news that is against or opposing their political identity as false or fake news. Their investment in their own political identity drives their evaluation and interpretation of the information. If the information is seen as opposing their own political identity, then it is labelled as false without regard to fact-checking or context. This framework of against also operates as a method for determining ‘worthy’ or ‘valuable’ information. Sandvoss (2019) notes political fans draw on a politics of against as a driver of political enthusiasm. This is also reflected in, then, enthusiasm for evaluating information. It’s fair to say that I’m cynical about information, political information. I do my own research, because I’m, like, really engaged. I don’t just trust mainstream media you know. I listen to podcasts and watch stuff on Youtube [sic], I’m always trying to find out different points of view…. I check everything myself, you know. I might find something that shows clearly what is being reported is biased… you know what the ABC would [report] and I find some-

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thing else that is true, well shows that they are biased, and I’m really driven to check it and prove it’s right and then I make sure that I share it. (Ted, 35–44, fairly right-wing)

Ted is driven to research and ‘fact-check’ information which contradicts those his political identity is against. In this case, Australia’s public broadcaster, ABC (seen as a left leaning media organisation by conservatives in Australia). As he notes, he is driven when he finds something that contradicts an ABC report ‘to prove it is right’ and therefore confirm his affective investment in the right. This political enthusiasm drives the labour required to validate preferred informational sources. Critical thinking, in questioning and then checking or proving something fits with an ideological positioning to be true, is also part of an identity performance, one in which these desirable attributes are attributed to those of that person’s political affiliation. Ted is not alone in his view that news consumption requires the labour of fact-checking and critical thinking. Research shows that this a common perception (Nelson and Lewis 2021) and it is also reflected in survey participant responses: As an example: I check it out on the internet (8) (American, 55–64, male, very left-wing) I will look for other sources that confirm it. I also use mainstream sources and will go to fact checkers like Snopes and the Washington Post to see what they have to say about it. If I do not know much about the source I will check it out on Wikipedia (20) (American, 65–74, female, fairly left-wing). I check on other sources, usually the BBC. (243) (American, 65–74, male, centralist) I try to read articles from more than one news source to see how information matches (102) (Australian, 45–54, male, centralist)

These example comments show a range of approaches that participants use to evaluate information. They check mainstream media organisations and established fact-checkers, along with sources such as Wikipedia, which historically has inaccurate information due to its crowd-sourcing. There is even just mention of ‘the internet’ more broadly as a source to check. As Nelson and Lewis (2021) note: “even if people follow the news regularly

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and implicitly trust it by virtue of giving it their time and attention, they also appear to push back against that characterisation because the alternative may be more socially desirable: to be seen as smart, savvy, confident, and critically distant from ‘biased’ journalists—to not, in effect, be one of those ‘sheep’ who blindly follow” (15). There are numerous examples from survey participants that listed their ‘critical reasoning’ (8,78), ‘critical thinking’ (1, 62, 81, 84, 127, 229, 281) and ‘common sense’ (3, 12, 38, 59, 100, 259) as the tools they use to determine false information.

The Who, Not the What For many, their politics of against is mobilised for a wide textual field, where particular media are markers of the ‘other’ and, therefore, it is not what the stories say, but who is saying it that becomes a factor in evaluating information. As many survey participants note, when asked how they determine false information, they evaluate on their perceived understanding of the credibility of the source. For example: when it comes from cnn nbc cbs pbs [sic] and others it is always false (282) (American, 55–64 male, very right-wing) If it comes from CNN or MSNBC (151) (American, 65–74 male, very right-wing) Never listening to CNN (68) (American, 25–34 male, fairly right-wing) CNBC, FOX, ABC always tell the truth. (111) (American, 55–64 male, slightly right-wing) Never believe anything Murdoch says (41) (Australian, 18–24 female, fairly left-wing) Don’t listen to Fox news (43) (American, 25–34 female, very left-wing)

For these participants the fake news label is applied not to specific stories or pieces of information, but rather to the organisation producing it. This evaluation process provides a method to disregard news that they might disagree with. As Debra (55–64, fairly left-wing) notes, reputation can be created by a fake news label: I think it is safe to say any sane person or educated person is going to realise some of the stuff that is put out by a Fox News is fake. It is clearly pushing an agenda.

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It’s sometimes even in just how it’s presented it’s not exactly polished, it’s clear that they are trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

For Debra, part of the process of upholding her self-conception as a critical thinker is to disregard Fox News, news which, as someone who self nominates as ‘fairly left-wing,’ is news or commentary that she disagrees with. Of note is that she is attributing factual accuracy to the style of presentation. Other research shows that, for TV news in particular, if how the news is presented aligns with how the viewer sees the world, as well as how they see themselves, then the viewer will deem that news more trustworthy (Peck 2021). This could also be understood as part of wider fan-like behaviours. Sandvoss (2005) describes the fan experience as narcissistic, as the fan looks for a reflection of themselves in the fan object. For those involved in online political discussion, performance of political identity, then, requires a reliance and trust in news sources that reflects that identity, but also their own self-conception in terms of ‘polish’ or style. For others, they suggest that their trust in a news source as a form of information was based on their own ‘historical’ evaluation of the organisation. For example: Past track records are important. But I also consider whether a given source seems to have an overriding agenda, beyond simply presenting facts. A degree of editorial slant is inevitable (just judging what stories are worth reporting for instance), but I find it fairly easy to detect when a source slants reports excessively one way or another. (2) (American, 55–64 male, fairly right-wing) By past history of getting things wrong or always taking one side (248) (American, 65–74 male, centralist) from the history of their reporting. If they have been accurate in the past and didn’t jump to false conclusions I tend to believe their story (127) (American, 65–74 male, very right-wing)

For these survey respondents a reputation is created for a news organisation, and then that continues to inform their trust in information provided from these sources. This suggests that news organisations will struggle to change their reputation with their audience, even if they address concerns. There is evidence that history with a news source and trust in it is formed as part of early identity development. As Barbara, a 35–44-year-old, slightly left-of-centre commenter, notes, her parents (who she suggests were also “fairly left-wing”) inform her news choices:

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So I guess I trust ABC and SBS like my parents did. So I’ve really always been that way. I’m more inclined to get my information there as well as join the discussion there. I want to debate intelligently and you find like-minded people there.

Barbara draws her identity from her upbringing, that both she and her parents identify with the left. She suggests this informs where she sources her information and involves herself in discussion. Interestingly she equates ‘intelligence’ with those who she deems to hold similar views to her own. Her trust in and reliance on these news sources is a strong part of the performance of her identity. Dorothy (18–24, slightly left-of-­centre) also attributes trust in news sources to her family. My parents always watch the ABC and that’s where I go for news. I guess I learnt from my parents what to trust in news, I’m like them, and I find that I tend to like the way they report more… so if I am commenting on say news [news.com.au] then I will link back to ABC, especially if I’m trying to make the point that the story or person is biased or not knowing the whole picture.

For Dorothy, trust in ABC was established by her parents and she identifies as ‘like them.’ Therefore, her trust in, and then use of, ABC information in debate, is part her performance of self. Like, Dorothy, many surveyed suggest that the opinion of others was an important factor in choosing which news to believe.

Fan-like Identity Performance, Family, Friends and Networks As an example, when responding to a question about how they determine false information, these survey respondents note: Opinions of others. My own knowledge and views of important people and opinions of friends and family (37) (Australian, 25–34 female, slightly left-of-centre) Talking with friends who are more knowledgeable than me (49) (Australian, 35–44 female, fairly right-wing) My own judgement & the opinions of others (109) (Australian, 65–74 male, slightly left-of-centre)

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For these respondents the opinions of family, friends and others in their network are important factors in how they evaluate information. For respondent number 49 this is because she deems these friends as more knowledgeable than her, but what is implied here is also more trustworthy than news organisations. Lily (an 18–24-year-old, slightly right-of-centre) explains that with so much information available she likes to verify by discussions with her father: If I see something and I’m not sure. I’ll ask him, like, Dad have you seen this, what do you think? And usually he’ll give me an answer that just makes sense… with political stuff he’s seen it before or you know understands that historical context.

Lily describes her Dad as a Liberal voter (the Australian conservative party) and suggests her political views ‘mostly’ align with him. Therefore, his opinion operates as a form of a fact-checker, whereby he can provide a rationale or explain something so that it fits within her existing views and political identity. Lily also values the ‘history’ her Dad has with political knowledge, which again may align less with facts and more his own values and attitudes. Charlotte, a 35–44 centralist also likes to talk with others to help her verify information. Like I said before I read a lot and from both sides you know, so I do think that I am pretty informed. I like politics so I guess I gravitate to others who like politics and you know I talk about it with them some, not all the time because no one wants to be that person…. I do like to find out what they know and what they believe, particularly with my friends that are very one way, you know left or right. It can help to see how people are interpreting it, whatever the issue is, and means I keep on the issue level… I’ve gone and looked up other things in the past based on those conversations, so I guess it has helped me form my opinion.

For Charlotte, she views a major part of her political identity as a centralist to view things from an ‘issue level’ not from a ‘particular political party,’ but to help inform that identity she checks with her friends to help form her opinions. She draws a distinction between the information sources that she reads and then finding out how ‘the people’ interpret an issue. It is both of these elements that she uses to form her opinion and help verify information on an issue. For others it is broader than close friends and family or strong ties (Granovetter 1973); it is replication or seeing information more than once that helps give information credibility.

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If I see the same thing in more than one place from lots of my friends (211) (American, 65–74–64 male, centralist) It is keeps on showing on tv and friends and family thinks or knows its [sic] real. (92) (American, 25–34 male, centralist) if its trending (27) (Australian, 25–34 male, very right-wing)

Obviously, the trending or spreadability of content as a tool for ascertaining credibility of information has enormous implications. Disinformation, which is fabricated information intended to harm, is often content that has attributes that make it spreadable. Henry Jenkins and colleagues (Jenkins et  al. 2013) discuss the phenomenon of “spreadable media” whereby “spreadability” refers to “the technical resources that make it easier to circulate some kinds of content than others, the economic structures that support or restrict circulation, the attributes of a media text that might appeal to a community’s motivation for sharing material, and the social networks that link people through the exchange of meaningful bytes” (4). The central thesis of Jenkins et al.’s (2013) argument is that at the heart of media engagement are the social connections and interactions of audience members and therefore how they remix, interpret and circulate content. For Van Dijck (2013), the technological affordances of social media like Facebook don’t just facilitate this spreadability, but instead manipulate it, as media users indirectly to adapt their norms and behaviours. “The ecosystem of connective media does not reflect social norms; interconnected platforms engineer sociality, using real-life processes of normative behaviour (peer pressure) as a model for and an object of manipulation (popularity ranking)” (Dijck 2013, 174). Taking both Jenkins and colleagues’ and Van Dijck’s approach to spreadable media focuses our attention on the networked culture of communication practices and the socially embedded decisions that are made when we choose to share something, even if these decisions are encouraged through the platforms’ technological affordances. As Jenkins et al. (2013) suggest: “As people listen, read or view shared content, they think not only—often, not even primarily—about what the producer might have meant but about what the person who shared it was trying to communicate” (13). For the survey participants above, they choose to believe information that has spread, as this is imbued with a credibility. If they are seeing many of their network sharing the same thing, they are reading an interpretation of

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credibility from those they trust. Seeing the same information reflected in mainstream media can then provide an additional element of trustworthiness.

Seeing is Believing Linked to the concept of network validation as a measure of what individuals choose to believe, is the privileging of visual evidence or eye-­ witness reportage. As an example, these survey respondents outline when asked how they determined what was false information: If after watching a video of say Biden bragging about getting a prosecutor fired to protect his son they claim either, it didn’t happen, or, my favorite and theirs, ‘it was taken out of context’. I’m pretty sure they’re full of manure. (271) (American, 55–64, male, slightly right-of-centre) A lot of time if fact-checkers immediately jump on it. Especially of I’ve seen video to the contrary, and I have many times. (10) (Australian, 25–34, female, centralist) Seeing it for myself in a video which I have many times and you know what they are saying is false. (5) (Australian, 45–54 male, fairly right-wing)

For these respondents the act of seeing something themselves overrides any other measured of credibility. They believe that they are eye witnesses to the story. The concept of eye-witnessing is not new to journalism. Institutionalised eye-witnessing is a core way that journalists have constructed their authority and authenticity, as well as their claims to reporting the truth (Pantti 2019). However, here the ability to see something ‘for themselves’ is the ultimate signifier of credibility and can in fact work to reduce trust in the journalists who have historically mediated the witnessing. Whether accurate or disinformation, videos purporting to show ‘the truth,’ allow users to feel that they are not being duped (Nelson and Lewis 2021). However, there can of course still be an element of choosing to believe based on a user’s political identity. As Tabitha, 35–44 and nominating as slightly left-of-centre, notes: You often see these things doing the rounds, you know videos or photos or whatever that really conveniently prove some crackpot right-wing theory and you just

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know they are fake… I mean if you were even slightly critical you’d pick up on it, but people like to believe things that support their views.

Here Tabitha suggests a confirmation bias, in that those who are ‘other’ to her political identity, those that are ‘right-wing,’ will just believe something that supports their views without being critical. Of course, Tabitha doesn’t outline that she fact-checks these videos, but instead she ‘just know[s]’ they are fake. It is, therefore, Tabitha’s political identity which leads her to choose what to believe.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have explored the concept of fake news and how it relates to polarization in online political discussion. Overall, participants suggest that the act of interacting with and evaluating information, both that is shared in discussion and the news articles themselves, is an affective practice. The appraisal of information is driven not by an objective quest for truth and fact, but instead by feelings or instincts. Central to understanding what information is shared as part of a debate, and how information is evaluated that is shared by others, is an individual’s fan-like investment in their political identity. Drawing on an emotionally led evaluation process, participants in this study choose to evaluate information based on the investment they have in their political identity. They note they often equate news that is against or opposing attributes or beliefs ascribed to this identity as false or fake. This emotional interpretation could inform an affective practice of joining the discussion, to apply the ‘fake news label’ as a tool of reducing the credibility of those representing the ‘other’ or the opposing political affiliation. Interestingly, often critical thinking is an attribute ascribed to the political affiliation of the participant. Much as Nelson and Lewis (2021) find that audiences disregard news they might disagree with, as a method of upholding a self-­ conception as critical thinkers, participants in this study did this as part of a larger exercise in a politics of against. Therefore, in online political discussion, the choice of information to share, and the process of interpreting the information shared by others, is more a process of choosing which information is to be believed. The performance of self in online political discussion is much like that of a fan, in that it becomes a marker of the qualities and attributes that are assigned to the object of fandom—a political perspective.

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The networked culture of social media plays a vital role in the fan-like spread and evaluation of political information. Credibility can be provided through friends and family and even familiarity, if information is circulated on a large scale. This has implications for media literacy in those not only consuming news, but also taking part in online political discussion. If evaluation and interpretation of political information is driven by emotion and identity performance, and ‘fact-checking’ is equated to how widespread information is, there is little hope of rational, fact-based evaluation. Next, in the final chapter of the book, I will explore this implication, along with the others unearthed in this study. It will examine how understanding fan-like behaviours as drivers of polarization in online political discussion opens up new avenues for research within this important field. Specifically, it will examine how understanding the role of fan-like behaviours in polarization can inform the study of engagement with conspiracy theories and conversely combat political disillusionment.

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CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: Politics and the Political Informed by Fandom

Over the course of this book, I have attempted to show how understanding our investment in a political perspective as fan-like has enormous utility in understanding the broader mechanisms at play in participatory politics. Using fan studies as an interpretative framework, I have argued that there are substantial factors that underlie polarization in online political discussion—identity performance, entertainment and affective investment. As (Dean 2017) so astutely notes “fandom is now an established feature of contemporary politics deserving greater analytical attention than it has thus far received from political scientists” (409). Everyday life, including that which would have traditionally been distinguished as private and public is undertaken on social media platforms. As Settle (2018) notes, the barrier between public and private and two types of talk (i.e. political and social), has been removed resulting in a fusing of our social and political identities. She specifically focuses on the technological affordances of social networking platforms and how they transform the structure and heterogeneity of political conversations. There is no doubt that these affordances help individuals to intertwine their social and political lives, however, I have focused on an individual’s behaviours as they relate to their investment in a political perspective, rather than the platforms themselves. These behaviours are certainly enabled through technology; however, I have attempted to focus our attention on aspects of the performance of self that are informed by our affective

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investment in our political perspective. The platforms through which we access and comment on both popular and political texts are the same, facilitating similar modes of interaction. Given that fandom is a common and ordinary aspect of everyday life and therefore any online engagement could be a “generally understood language through which one’s identity is communicated and assessed” (Sandvoss 2005, 3), it is natural that our investment in a political perspective could be experienced in a similar manner to that of an object of popular culture. By taking a fan studies lens, I have attempted to examine online political discussion and address the following broad issues: Why do those who have the access and the ability to participate in these spaces choose to do so in the way that they do? Why is it that they behave in a way that often ends in the manifestation of polarization? To a large extent, I have argued that we are behaving in much the same way as we would in an online discussion about television show, musician or sporting team that we may be fans of. It is part of a performance, a performance of self, in which an affective investment in a particular political perspective drives a need to contribute, refute and ‘other’ those opposing. Because this performance stems from an emotional basis, judgments and contributions are often not rational or factual, but rather a form of establishing and defending an identity. This, of course, runs contra to the Habermasian (Habermas 1991) approach to examining online political discussion. Participation in online political discussion is not always based on a particular ideology or policy position, instead it stems from values and beliefs that the individual attributes to their chosen political perspective. This may indeed differ from the policy positions or ideology underpinning the political parties that are said to represent that position and those that others attribute to that political affiliation. Understanding this affiliation, then, as fan-like, a performance of identity in group discussion suggests examining the narratives that may be used as part of that performance of self. Given that fan communities are created through the sharing of group narratives and myths, we need to examine which narratives are shared and their implications (Baym 2000). Lauren Berlant (2009) argues the political public sphere has been permeated by a mass experience of the private through a reinterpretation of economic insecurity, class conflict, racial discord and sexual unease. In what she describes as a “coupling of suffering and citizenship” (109), contemporary politics is about a rhetoric of trauma in which identity is informed by a struggle for ownership of that trauma. Those who have

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traditionally benefited from positions of privilege and power seek to claim a title of marginalised as a resistance to wider moves for equality and diversity. These narratives of traumatized identity have dramatically reshaped the dominant account of US citizenship. They also show that politics by caricature can have profound effects: on the ways people perceive their own social value and the social value of ‘Others’; on the ways they live daily life and see their futures; and on mainstream political discourse, which exploits national identity crises it foments to claim a popular mandate for radical shifts in norms of ideology and political practice. (Berlant 2009, 110)

Given the role of identity performance, and the defence of that performed identity, in the manifestation of polarization, polarization could be entrenched through competing claims to the marginalised position. This toxic fan practice (Proctor and Kies 2018) serves to create a feedback look of each side fighting to take the mantle of marginalisation while also refuting the right of the other to do the same. Examining online political discussion as a performance of self, in which one’s investment in their political perspective drives their contributions and interactions, suggests an affective practice that will not be swayed by logic and reason. Couple this with an emotive group narrative or claim to marginalisation from each opposing side, and the resulting polarization appears a natural result. How, then, can we reshape the discussion, to make people feel heard, connected and included, without rallying them through a call to a traumatised identity? What else can we enact in this affective investment in a political perspective that can serve to create more inclusive and productive discussion? Shifting our attention to these questions offers much in terms of tackling the manifestation of polarization that results in incivility and antagonism. Ultimately, what I have argued is that fandom of a political perspective will drive how we choose to participate in an online political discussion. That fandom informs the affective investment made in that perspective and everything (including people and issues) that are seen to represent that perspective. That investment informs the affective practice that is participating in an online political discussion. A practice that becomes about performance of self, whether through establishing a political identity or othering those we deem to represent an opposing side. That affective investment also informs our evaluation of information. What we choose to believe, and share, is part of a process of performing that self. Media

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literacy and fact-checking may do little, then, to stymie the spread of misand disinformation, given this fan-like connection between emotion and identity, and the evaluation and interpretation of political information. We also cannot undervalue the role that entertainment plays in participation in these discussions. Just as fandom of popular culture is associated with a sense of play and fun, so too can it inform participatory politics. Entertainment can be found in the differentiation of self through performance, and in finding others who we imagine representing our in-group or version of a political perspective. There is entertainment to be found in distinguishing ourselves from others, from banter and for some in ‘hatewatching’ the other, or the people, or media, seen to represent the other. All of these facets drive behaviours in online political discussion and ultimately can drive these discussions to become divided and uncivil. Drawing on an understanding of the role these fan-like behaviours have in online political discussion, we can begin to uncover new ways of interpreting and thinking about polarization. Simply ensuring people are exposed to opposing views can still serve to entrench existing opinions, suggesting that ascribing polarization to technology-enabled echo chambers does not provide an adequate explanation of the problem. If a person has a significant-enough investment in a political perspective, then a performance and defence of identity and even a quest for a sense of connectedness in community can drive antagonism. These factors will not be easily swayed by fact, as it isn’t the political affiliation or even the ideology that is ultimately driving this investment, but a sense of self. If emotion and community desire are in a large part about creating and maintaining identity, challenging that identity can only serve to further entrench it.

Examining the Fringes The study outlined in this book did not specifically examine extremism; however, there are numerous avenues that are presented here that could inform further scholarship in this space. The first wave of fan studies situated the fan as resistant (Sandvoss et al. 2017), as a method of legitimating fandom when it was often portrayed as a form of social pathology (Cavicchi 2018). As Stanfill(2020) argues, fannish behaviours are also evident in reactionary politics. Emotionally driven calls to join a collective rallying to resist what reactionaries view as marginalisation of the status quo, or existing power structures, draw on a fan-like experience to entice people to the extremes. As Bruns (2019) notes, citizens who are on the fringes of the

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political spectrum can still hear differing opinions, they are just unwilling to listen to them. If we understand extremism, though, as the object of a fan-like attachment, the role of identity performance and defence helps explain how one may cement in these beliefs. Some evidence exists that the move to extreme ideologies is a process, in which communication between and across the left-right divide decreases as the views become more extreme (Bright 2018) and the certainty with which people hold these beliefs (Stroud 2010). A form of affective contagion (Gibbs 2011) can then enhance these beliefs, for example, as hostile reactions by the mainstream only “confirm one’s status as a critical outsider” (Krämer 2017, 1302). Political identity and its performance on the fringes, then, is not just related to extreme views, but also a sense of self that is not easily duped, or one as a critical thinker, providing a sense of elitism to those not ascribing to those extreme views. Gray (2003) in his first articulation of the anti-fan describes anti-fans as having a distant reading position in which they constructed their version of the object of anti-fandom with an equal affective investment as fans. Equally, it could be argued that fan-like and even anti-fan-like reading positions are taken by citizens, in particular, those with more extremist views, where they are celebrating their counter or oppositional reading position. Some scholars have begun to use fandom to explore more extremist communities. Online conspiracy theory QAnon has been shown to use the manipulation and normalisation of toxic emotions to bring its adherents into a fanatic community (Reinhard et  al. 2021), while engaging with texts that proclaim white superiority can be viewed as a form of white supremacy fandom (Stanfill 2021). Indeed, Stanfill (2021) argues that just as the appeal of transmedia fan fictions is that they are developed and marketed for immersion and interactive reimagining of the world, “white supremacy encourages looking at the world for patterns its participants are primed to see” (5). As I have outlined in the study presented here, fan-like behaviours are present not just in the discussion of politics, but help explain the traction and spreadability of misinformation, disinformation and fake news as anchored in people’s own self-perceptions. Much like fans of popular culture texts, those who believe and peddle misinformation/disinformation are drawn to do so by a longing of belonging to a community and an intense affective relationship with the collective associated with that ‘world view.’ It is through the spread and legitimisation of misinformation and disinformation that extremist ideology permeates society. Therefore, the implications of the study suggest

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that trying to rectify problems with mis- and disinformation by simply ‘educating’ the public on the correct information will not be sufficient, as this does not address the underlying motivations of engaging with this discourse. In asking why people would join white supremacy fandom, Stanfill (2021) argues “for the same reason they join any other fandom: some text catches their eye and speaks to them, and then once they find their fellow fans, the community helps draw them into active participation, give them a sense of belonging and also more content to explore (8).” It is therefore vital that we find ways to examine, document and ultimately intervene in the affective immersion into an extremist community. Just as fan studies offer insights into immersion in a political perspective, as I have attempted to outline in this book, it offers much to understanding the indoctrination of those who keep moving into the fringes.

Disillusionment with Politics On the flip side of extremism is political apathy or political indifference, an equally corrosive force. Again, the study outlined here did not specifically examine those with political apathy, in fact, it focused on those who have enough investment in politics to regularly join online political discussion. However, much of what I have detailed here, as it relates to the affective investment of those involved in these discussions, can inform a project of combatting political apathy. Traditional definitions have defined political apathy as a lack of desire to engage in politics (Dean 1960; Rosenberg 1954) or a general indifference to politics or a low level of political awareness (Thompson and Horton 1960). However, in a world dominated by digital media, in which information is easily and readily accessible, research has moved to those who actively avoid political engagement. Research focuses on those who take the path of selective exposure, eliminating unwanted political information from their news feed via unfriending or unfollowing (Bode 2016; Kim et  al. 2013), or those who take a selective attention approach skipping over political content (Thorson et al. 2014; Bode et al. 2017). One of the most cited reasons for people to refrain from joining political discussion is the avoidance of conflict (Dalisay et al. 2016). A common evocation of good manners is the adage that it is not polite to speak about politics and religion. This is an adage that fits well within a deliberative frame of examining political discussion, in which incivility and conflict are conflated in an

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attempt to find a way to get users to reach consensus. Papacharissi warns against coalescing civility and politeness as it may eschew the benefits of heated and forthright conversation (Papacharissi 2004, 260). Indeed, if we take a Mouffian (2005) view of pluralist democracy, then conflict is a legitimate and necessary form of expression to avoid antagonism and apathy. She argues for a mobilisation of passions to ensure politics has “real purchase on people’s desires and fantasies” (2005, 6). Understanding investment in a political perspective as a form of fandom offers much to realising this vision. Participants in this study showed an intense connection to political perspectives and in some cases politics as a whole—so, how can this be harnessed? Recognising the affective dimension of the mobilisation of political interest and collective political identities suggests that political ‘texts’ need to be considered, adapted and circulated in manners akin to those of traditional fandom. Central to much of fan studies is text–fan relations, how this flows across media platforms, or as Henry Jenkins (2006) defines it—transmedia. Fan studies can, therefore, help make sense of the proliferation of texts and people across platforms and in the instance of extremism enable interventions, but in the interests of political engagement, for adapting messaging to account for the importance of community, belonging and identity. That is not to say we should be reverting all political messaging and discussion to that which may be associated as populist—creation of the collective through an ‘us’ and ‘them’—but instead enabling the political to be adapted and circulated in ways more closely linked to contemporary social life. In this way, fan studies offers us a road map for affective mobilisation and investment that may allow for Chantel Mouffe’s (2009) vision for a public sphere that encourages identification around a range of differing positions so that we might choose between real alternatives.

Not Forgetting the Listeners This study specifically focused on those who were loud about their views— those that actively took part in online political discussion, and in the case of the interviews, were witnessed involved in a polarized discussion. Of course, polarization can be silent. One can hold strong beliefs and affiliations that help determine the self—but may not perform this. That does not mean that this person is not having similar reactions to those listed here, but they are not flagging them in a public way. As Gray (2021) notes in his examination of dislike of television, many chose to internalise their

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dislike. This does not mean it is any less problematic for society as a whole and is certainly worthy of further investigation. I have previously investigated the affective investment of what I term “engaged listeners” in news and the discussion that follows news stories online (Barnes 2013, 2014, 2016). Those who don’t flag their participation in these spaces can and do still generate a fan-like attachment to an imagined collective through the reading of these spaces. As Sandvoss (2013) notes, the largest majority are the casual fans or those not actively productive; however, these fans still have an intense affective relationship with the object of their fandom. Further research could therefore extend a fan studies approach to examine the fan-like behaviours of those who may feel increasingly polarized from the perceived other, but may not publicly flag that. This approach could offer significant benefits for understanding contemporary political practice.

Conclusion Traditionally, fan studies is based on audience research or more specifically a reception approach. By applying a fan studies lens to participatory politics, as I have done here, we can begin to focus on what citizens do with political talk—what influence, effects or meaning it takes on and more specifically how it is used to construct individual and collective identity or how it fits into what Grossberg (1992) calls our “mattering maps” (57–63). What I have argued here is that fan studies offer an opportunity to shift our focus from the political texts that are circulated, or even how they are circulated, to the individual engagement, so that we may begin to uncover valuable insights about engagement with politics and our processes and decoding of the many varied political ‘texts.’ The focus of this book has been to examine the manifestation of polarization in online political discussion. How can we understand the refusal or inability to meet in the middle and the increasing division over important issues? It is only by understanding the myriad of factors, including those fan-like behaviours that I have identified here, that we can begin to truly combat polarization. By taking the interpretative lens of fandom we can refocus the investigation of polarization and the resulting antagonism as deeply entwined with a quest for community, and the performance of identity, not in ideology or fact. To do this, we need to move away from viewing fandom as related to only frivolous and meaningless activity and instead accept that fan-like behaviours are deeply cemented in contemporary digital communication and sociality.

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It is worth noting again here that my attempts to take a different approach to examining the conflict found in online political discussion is not a way to excuse those who are using toxic, aggressive and abusive approaches to others, and discussion generally. As Gray (2021) argues, we must not “stop at the form and instead listen to whether and when something more meaningful and more important is being uttered (and if not let us move on)” (220–221).

References Barnes, Renee. 2013. Understanding the Affective Investment Produced through Commenting on Australian Alternative Journalism Website New Matilda. New Media & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444813511039. ———. 2014. The ‘Ecology of Participation’ A Study of Audience Engagement on Alternative Journalism Websites. Digital Journalism 2 (4): 542–557. ———. 2016. The Ecology of Participation. In The SAGE Handbook of Digital Journalism, ed. Tamara Witschge, Chris Anderson, David Domingo, and Alfred Hermida, 179–191. New York: Sage. Baym, Nancy K. 2000. “Tune in, Log on: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community.” Thousand Oaks, California. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452204710. Berlant, Lauren. 2009. The Intimate Public Sphere. In American Studies: An Anthology, ed. Janice A. Radway, Kevin Gaines, Barry Shank, and Penny von Eschen, 109–118. Wiley Blackwell. https://books.google.com.au/ books?hl=en&lr=&id=3D9FE-­UfYxEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA109&dq=intimate+p ublics+berlant&ots=1hYLqAqDKC&sig=PWjuxU2shDE1Rsqj6_Zy52i8mZs. Bode, Leticia. 2016. Pruning the News Feed: Unfriending and Unfollowing Political Content on Social Media. Research and Politics 3 (3). https://doi. org/10.1177/2053168016661873. Bode, Leticia, Emily K. Vraga, and Sonya Troller-Renfree. 2017. Skipping Politics: Measuring Avoidance of Political Content in Social Media. Research & Politics 4 (2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168017702990. Bright, Jonathan. 2018. Explaining the Emergence of Political Fragmentation on Social Media: The Role of Ideology and Extremism. Journal of Computer-­ Mediated Communication 23 (1): 17–33. https://doi.org/10.1093/ jcmc/zmx002. Bruns, Axel. 2019. Are Filter Bubbles Real? Digital Futures Series. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Cavicchi, Daniel. 2018. A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies. In A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies, ed. Paul Booth, 27–46. John Wiley & Sons. Dalisay, Francis, Matthew J. Kushin, and Masahiro Yamamoto. 2016. Conflict as a Barrier to Online Political Participation? A Look at Political Participation in an

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Era of Web and Mobile Connectivity. International Journal of E-Politics 7 (1): 37–53. https://doi.org/10.4018/IJEP.2016010103. Dean, Dwight G. 1960. Alienation and Political Apathy. Social Forces 38 (3): 185–189. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2574080?casa_token=g-­NW5I7sb pcAAAAA:q-­b-­r_j8stlHDWUZrY6qys4QKYaYE5EB-­GqUjEgpbG2M7IayG U8CoDgSUI2nvEwnuY1nR6ZgstXLnp0bpnJUg9_hk4AWjfDt3D7iIOF XP0aUaQ_4pTo. Dean, Jonathan. 2017. Politicising Fandom. The British Journal of Politics 19 (2): 408–424. https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148117701754. Gibbs, A. 2011. Affect Theory and Audience. In The Handbook of Media Audiences, ed. Virginia Nightingale, 251–266. Maldon, MA: John Wiley & Sons. Gray, Jonathan. 2003. New Audiences, New Textualities Anti-Fans and Non-Fans. International Journal of Cultural Studies 6 (1): 64–81. Gray, Johnathon. 2021. Dislike-Minded: Media, Audiences, and the Dynamics of Taste. New York University Press. Grossberg, L. 1992. The Affective Sensibility of Fandom. In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis, 60–65. London: Routledge. Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: MIT press. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Kim, Yonghwan, Hsuan Ting Chen, and Homero Gil De Zúñiga. 2013. Stumbling upon News on the Internet: Effects of Incidental News Exposure and Relative Entertainment Use on Political Engagement. Computers in Human Behavior 29 (6): 2607–2614. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.CHB.2013.06.005. Krämer, Benjamin. 2017. Populist Online Practices: The Function of the Internet in Right-Wing Populism. Information, Communication & Society 20 (9): 1293–1309. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1328520. Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. On the Political, Thinking in Action. Routledge. https:// books.google.com.au/books?id=MrufwdOhhaMC. Mouffe, Chantal. 2009. The Democratic Paradox. Radical Thinkers. London: Verso Books. Papacharissi, Zizi. 2004. Democracy Online: Civility, Politeness, and the Democratic Potential of Online Political Discussion Groups. New Media & Society 6 (2): 259–283. Proctor, William, and Bridget Kies. 2018. On Toxic Fan Practices and the New Culture Wars. Participations 15 (1): 127–142. Reinhard, CarrieLynn D, David Stanley, and Linda Howell. 2021. Fans of Q: The Stakes of QAnon’s Functioning as Political Fandom. American Behavioral Scientist. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642211042294.

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Rosenberg, Morris. 1954. Some Determinants of Political Apathy. Public Opinion Quarterly 18 (4): 349–366. https://academic.oup.com/poq/article-­abstr act/18/4/349/1925107. Sandvoss, Cornel. 2005. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2013. Toward an Understanding of Political Enthusiasm as Media Fandom: Blogging, Fan Productivity and Affect in American Politics. Participations.Org. https://www.participations.org/Volume%2010/Issue%20 1/12a%20Sandvoss%2010%201.pdf. Sandvoss, Cornel, Jonathan Gray, C. Lee, and Harrington. 2017. Introduction. Why Still Study Fans? In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, 2nd ed., 1–26. NYU Press. Settle, Jaime E. 2018. Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America. Cambridge University Press. Stanfill, Mel. 2020. Introduction: The Reactionary in the Fan and the Fan in the Reactionary. Television & New Media 21 (2): 123–134. ———. 2021. White Supremacy as a Fandom. In Society of Cinema and Media Studies, Virtual Conference. Stroud, Natalie Jomini. 2010. Polarization and Partisan Selective Exposure. Journal of Communication 60 (3): 556–576. https://doi.org/10.1111/j. 1460-­2466.2010.01497.x. Thompson, Wayne E., and John E. Horton. 1960. Political Alienation as a Force in Political Action. Social Forces 38 (3): 190–195. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/2574081?casa_token=O97AALISu0wAAAAA:-­lLv1es4ddsgcygBz4 zJIXKQ5D_8W0-­gp1CheEHp2k3Kot9TeqmQaHpy88a5LBMqAIWUiH3 Pysp_bg-­iDYg8ChCcSa7DM4-­ZJ_U5tRo-­mKs2HKvRCU0. Thorson, Kjerstin, Emily K. Vraga, and Neta Klinger-Vilenchik. 2014. Don’t Push Your Opinions on Me: Young Citizens and Political Etiquette on Facebook. In Presidential Campaigning and Social Media: An Analysis of the 2012 Campaign, ed. John Allen Hendricks and Dan Schill, 74–93. New York: Oxford University Press. https://experts.umn.edu/en/publications/dont-­push-­your-­opinions-­on-­ me-­young-­citizens-­and-­political-­etique.



Method Appendix

I began examining the intersection of fandom and online commenting on news websites in 2010 during my PhD. When I left journalism to move into academia, the industry was struggling to make sense of how this participatory practice could be harnessed and I was interested in uncovering why people chose to comment. As a result, my PhD research was concerned with audience engagement with online news broadly and did not focus on politics or political news. But even back then, I noticed how news seemed to encourage a particular discussion, one that was predicated on an affective investment in a particular political identity rather than facts. Fast-forward to 2019, when I began the data collection for the research presented in this book, and while that affective style of commenting in relation to politics was still evident (if not more so), things were vastly different. Across the world populist and deeply polarizing leaders were in power, including President Donald Trump Jr, who The Washington Post labelled “the most polarizing president on record” (Bump 2019, n.p.). Polarization and how it manifested for everyday people was also increasingly in the spotlight and often connected with a particular evaluation of online communication. The stigma associated with participating in online discussion had dramatically increased. Those who took part in the comment threads were openly disparaged, with an online commenter synonymous with crazy, loony, unhinged and just plain nasty (these were words I heard countless times when discussing my research with family, friends and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Barnes, Fandom and Polarization in Online Political Discussion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14039-6

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even casual acquaintances). As a result, I quickly found that recruiting participants to discuss their online commenting behaviours was particularly difficult compared to my project a decade before. It was one thing to take part in these discussions; it seemed quite another to admit to a passionate investment in them. Thus, my methods were adapted across the course of the project. My goal with this Methods Appendix is to outline my research design, and, in particular, how it evolved. Below I outline each data collection method, along with participant specifics.

National Settings of Study The study has focused on two national settings: the United States and Australia. The United States represents one of the most polarized contemporary political environments (Iyengar et  al. 2019). Equally, Australian news consumers are more polarized than the global average (Park et al. 2021). Australia is my home country, so I am more intimately acquainted with the flash points for polarized discussion (and there were many during the study period: deadly bushfires and climate changes debates; COVID). Given the United States and its ubiquity with scholarly debates on polarization in politics, it provided another useful national setting. The study period also included the intense lead up to the 2020 US election and Trump’s eventual defeat. As Western democracies, the United States and Australia have similarities; however, they have some key differences. Australia has preferential voting (sometimes referred to as rank order voting), while the United States operates on a first-past-the-post system. In Australia, preferential voting differs slightly across states and levels of federal parliament but essentially, candidates must receive more than 50% of the total formal votes cast; otherwise, if a majority is not gained on the first count, then preferences are distributed until the candidate obtains an absolute majority. It is also compulsory to vote in Australia. The first-past-­ the-post system, used in the majority of elections (including that of the president) in the United States, elects a candidate who receives the majority of votes following a single count. While both are forms of a democratic voting system, these differences have the potential to influence the broader political environment. Interestingly, preferential or rank order voting has been often regarded as ensuring more moderate politicians due to the need for candidates to appeal to those outside of their base to ensure election (Crosson and Tsebelis 2021). However, while compulsory voting has been associated

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with high voter turnout and mitigating inequalities of turnout in social groups (Lever 2010), it has also been associated with impacting election results and policy decisions by obligating politically unknowledgeable, uninterested and untrusting voters (Singh 2019). Overall, these key differences suggest each location offers much to the investigation of polarization as it manifests in online political discussion. This study has specifically focused on the individual’s experience of their investment in a political perspective and online political discussion, so these broader political institutional factors are not explored. However, I note them here for those looking to further interpret my findings.

Observations I have always read comment threads. From my time as a journalist, to my PhD research, and for the years between that and the research outlined in this book. Firstly, on news websites and I then followed these across to Facebook when major news organisations redeployed commenting to this space. At the beginning of 2019, however, I began a systematic approach to observing these spaces with my two developed research questions in mind: How does polarization manifest in online political debate? What factors influence polarization in individuals in online political discussion? News Pages It is these observations that form the backbone of the argument outlined in this book: that fan-like behaviours fuel polarized online discussion. My observations took place in the comment threads of news stories shared by four Facebook news pages, Fox News and CNN in the United States and ABC News and News.com.au in Australia. The observations took place throughout 2019. These new organisations were chosen as they are seen to represent differing political leanings. In Australia, public broadcaster, ABC, is seen as a left-leaning media outlet, while the Rupert Murdoch-­ owned News.com.au is viewed as right-leaning. Likewise, often in line with President Trump’s rhetoric, CNN is seen as left-leaning and Fox News as right-leaning. Following other social media researchers, I took on the role of observer as participant (Berger 2014; Gerrard 2017; Miguel 2016). This meant

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that I observed comment thread participation, but did not pretend to be an actual discussion participant. I did not announce my presence in the comment threads (I would do this later in the private Facebook group as outlined below) as I did not want my presence to affect the group dynamics and behaviour (Berger 2014), and instead attempted to observe natural interactions and language. I followed a simple process for my observations. Each day, at varying times, I navigated to one Australian news organisation Facebook page and one US news Facebook page (alternating each day) and chose a story at random in the first 5–10 posts that included more than 50 comments. I then scrolled through the comment thread documenting my observations through detailed field notes. Topics of news stories ranged widely and corresponded with the news agenda of the day. Stories chosen were varied, they were not always overtly or explicitly political, but needed to present a news event as opposed to, for example, a recipe or other lifestyle-type content. This was based on the premise that politics can manifest in the everyday practices and interactions (Settle 2018) and therefore a story did not need to be about a particular politician or political party to elicit intense discussion in which political identity became a potent factor. I did, however, determine that a news event in which facts are reported and therefore open to interpretation and discussion were much more likely to produce the polarized discussion that I wanted to examine in this research. I did not collect or save comments through screenshots or other digital methods as this data would have identified and captured users who were not involved in the study. In line with well-documented debates (see boyd 2014; Markham and Buchanan 2012), my institutional ethical clearance was based on the premise that despite the fact that Facebook news pages are public, many commenters may not expect, or appreciate, their comments or information to be collected or shared outside of the place where they were submitted. As such, I do not directly quote from the observation data as this could make those commenters identifiable.  rivate Facebook Group P My observational approach in the closed Facebook group differed slightly. My formal observations of the group took place from October 2019 until December 2020, including the intense lead up to, and, the US presidential election. To track the group’s progress, I remained a member of the group and continued to check updates until November 2021. My observations were broken into two distinct periods. One in which I remained a ‘silent’

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observer from October 2019–May 2020, where my presence was only known to the group founder. This allowed for unobtrusive observation as outlined above. In May 2020, I made my presence known to members when seeking volunteers for interview. I also did not collect any screenshots during the observation period of the group. Instead, I made detailed field notes of the discussions I observed daily. With only 3–5 posts published per day, I skim-read each post and then would spend more detailed time on 1–2 posts. I was provided permission for the use of the edited post included as an example in Chap. 5. Other quotes used in this chapter are provided as explanatory examples and are limited so that they are not traceable. Given that one of my findings for the case study of the private group was that members appeared to value hiding their interactions and political discussions from broader networks, I have chosen not to name the group. Instead, I refer to it as ‘The Group.’ This helps to ensure participant anonymity and member privacy. The observation periods for both the news organisation comment threads and the private group helped identify potential interviewees for recruiting.

Interviews Two sets of interviews informed this study. One of Australian commenters (n = 22) on comment threads shared by ABC News and News.com.au and the other of participants in the private Facebook group page (n = 19). I did not create a new or separate academic Facebook account to recruit participants and instead used my personal profile, to ensure transparency about my identity and intentions (Gerrard 2017). It was an ethical requirement that I presented as myself; however, there were numerous pitfalls to this approach. On several occasions after attempting to make contact with commenters I was targeted by trolls, and was often subjected to nasty and in a few cases abusive messaging. This made finding participants a difficult and potentially harmful activity—limiting my overall recruitment. This behaviour was particularly prevalent when I began attempting to recruit commenters on the US news Facebook comment threads. As a result, I adapted the research process to focus on the private Facebook group. As I outline below, I noticed the founder of this group recruiting on the comment threads during my observations. With limited luck in recruiting US commenters, I determined to take this approach. Once joining the group,

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I soon found that as a case study the group also had other benefits for the research. The group’s mission to bring those with differing political perspectives together for productive discussion offered a rich site for examining online political discussion and polarization. It’s life cycle as a community would also produce useful insights for the role of technological affordances and moderation policies in facilitating political discussion.  ustralian News Commenters A Participants were recruited by direct contact through Facebook Messenger after they were observed involved in polarized debate following a news story shared by ABC News or News.com.au on Facebook during the period of November 2019 to July 2020. Some had completed a pilot survey shared on these platforms (outlined in more detail below) prior to interview. Debates were characterised as ‘polarized’ if they included comments from two or more ideologically opposed commenters who failed to reach a consensus (Conover et al. 2011). Additionally, I only approached commenters who provided at least one comment that exhibited the deliberative attributes—logic, use of evidence, and rational arguments (Papacharissi 2004; Stroud et  al. 2015). This was used as a measure to only include commenters who made an attempt to debate the issue rather than personally attack or name call. Throughout this period, 89 potential interviewees were approached and only 22 elected to participate. Interviewees completed an additional survey prior to interview that asked them to self-­ nominate political orientation (options were given as far left, fairly left, slightly left-of-centre, centre, slightly right-of-centre, fairly right, far right) and rate of commenting (a ten-point measure from rarely to at least 10 times per day). Options for political orientation replicated those used in the annual global Reuters Institute digital news report (Newman et  al. 2020). I deliberately did not ask participants who they had voted for as I wanted to move away from the significant quantity of research that examines polarization in relation to voting intention (see Barberá 2015; Tucker et al. 2018). Instead, my intention was to examine a self-nominated political identity and draw out how this manifested in online discussion. Only those who commented at least weekly were invited for full interview. This was to ensure that the motivations and behaviours of those who were regularly engaging in online political discussion were examined. See Table A.1 for details of the interview participants. Interviews canvassed views on online political discussion and their behaviours. Questions focused on commenting behaviours, news

  METHOD APPENDIX 

147

Table A.1  Australian commenter interviews: Participant details Pseudonym Gender Age

Political orientation

How often comment

Fairly left-wing

Tanya Charlotte

Female 55–64 Prof qual bachelor’s degree or similar Female 55–64 Master’s degree Female 35–44 Master’s degree

Bryce

Male

Fairly left-wing

Between 6 and 10 times a day Weekly Between 2 and 5 times a day Weekly

Debra

Education

Samantha

25–34 Prof qual bachelor’s degree or similar Female 45–54 Prof qual bachelor’s degree or similar Male 35–44 Prof qual bachelor’s degree or similar Female 55–64 Master’s degree

Brad

Male

Penny Xanthe Barbara

Female 65–74 Prof qual bachelor’s degree or similar Female 45–54 High school Female 35–44 High school

Tom

Male

David

Male

Trevor

Male

Tracey Ted

25–34 High school

25–34 Prof qual bachelor’s degree or similar 35–44 High school

Lily

65–74 Prof qual bachelor’s degree or similar Female 18–24 Master’s degree

Mark

Male

Simon Thomas Lucas Willow Tabitha Dorothy

18–24 Prof qual bachelor’s degree or similar Male 45–54 Prof qual bachelor’s degree or similar Male 25–34 Prof qual bachelor’s degree or similar Male 55–64 Prof qual bachelor’s degree or similar Female 25–34 Master’s degree Female 35–44 Prof qual bachelor’s degree or similar Female 18–24 High school

Fairly left-wing Centre

Fairly left-wing Fairly right-wing Slightly right-of-centre Fairly right-wing Slightly right-of-centre Centre Slightly left-of-centre Centre Fairly right- wing Slightly right-of-centre Slightly right-of-centre slightly left-of-centre Fairly right-wing Centre Slightly left-of-centre Fairly right-wing Slightly left-of-centre Slightly left-of-centre

Between 2 and 5 times a day Between 6 and 10 times a day Between 2 and 5 times a day 4–6 days a week Weekly 4–6 days a week Between 2 and 5 times a day 2–3 days a week Between 2 and 5 times a day Between 2 and 5 times a day 4–6 days a week 4–6 days a week Between 6 and 10 times a day Between 2 and 5 times a day Between 2 and 5 times a day 4–6 days a week 4–6 days a week Between 6 and 10 times a day

148 

METHOD APPENDIX

consumption and involvement in political activities on and offline. Interviews were conducted over Zoom, Skype and Facetime and lasted between 35 minutes and 1 hour and 30 minutes.  rivate Facebook Group Members P I first learned of The Group when I was observing the comment threads of stories shared on Facebook by both Fox News and CNN. The founder left comments in these threads with links to the group. Through these comments I contacted him, outlining my research project. As outlined above, I joined the group in October 2019, but only made my presence known in the group in May 2020. It was during this time that I approached individuals asking for an interview. Those that I approached were notable because they themselves posted regularly (at least weekly) in the group or at least commented regularly on other’s posts (at least weekly). In total, I undertook 19 interviews with members of the group (details provided in Table A.2) throughout May–August 2020, one with Greg the founder and 18 with members who volunteered. I approached 26 individuals and 18 agreed to interview. Interviewees completed a survey prior to interview that asked for details about engagement with news organisations, political affiliation and basic demographics. This survey was the same as that outlined above for the Australian commenters. Interviews canvassed views on online political discussion and their behaviours. Interviews were either conducted via Zoom or Facetime or over Facebook Messenger. The names of all interview participants were chosen and assigned randomly from a baby names book. I recognise that my name choices may imply more about my cultural positioning than those interviewed. These choices are not intended to reflect on the individuals.

Surveys My goal with the survey was to explore some of my observations with a larger cohort of commenters and enable collection of data in 2021. I first undertook a pilot survey in July 2020 to refine my questions, with 148 responding. The pilot survey was distributed through the Facebook pages of ABC News (Australia) and news.com.au (Australia). The pilot survey asked about commenting behaviours (open and closed), political affiliation and news usage (open and closed). It also included an open response space for those surveyed to outline how taking part in an online political

  METHOD APPENDIX 

149

Table A.2  The Group interviews: Participant details Pseudonym Gender Age

Education

How often commenta

Slightly right-of-centre Slightly right-of-centre Slightly left-of-centre Fairly right-wing Centre

Monthlyb

Greg

Male

Susan

Daisy Victoria

Female 34–45 Prof qual bachelor’s degree or similar Female 34–45 Prof qual bachelor’s degree or similar Female 34–45 High school Female 44–55 High School

Chris

Male

Sam

Male

Annika

Female 44–55

Fairly left-wing

Lesley Beth

Female 34–45 Prof qual bachelor’s degree or similar Female 34–45 Master’s degree

Diane

Female 54–65 High school

Slightly right-of-centre Slightly right-of-centre Centre

Greta

Kimberly Harriet

Female 25–34 Prof qual bachelor’s degree or similar Male 34–45 Prof qual bachelor’s degree or similar Female 24–34 High school Female 44–55 High school

Ben Darren

Male Male

Margaret

Female 34–45 High school

Steven

Male

Tricia

Peter

25–34 High school

Political orientation

54–65 Prof qual bachelor’s degree or similar 54–65 High school

24–34 Master’s degree 18–25 High School

54–65 Prof qual bachelor’s degree or similar

Slightly right-of-centre Very right wing

Fairly left-wing Very left-wing Fairly left-wing Slightly left-of-centre Centre Slightly left-of-centre Slightly left-of-centre Fairly left-wing

Weekly Weekly Weekly 2–3 days a week 4–6 days a week 4–6 days a week 2–3 days a week 4–6 days a week 2–3 days a week 4–6 days a week 4–6 days a week Weekly Weekly 2–3 days a week Weekly 2–3 days a week Weekly 4–6 days a week

This question related to how often they commented on any news story, not just within the group

a

As founder of the group, Greg noted he barely commented personally anymore and instead posted in an administrative capacity b

150 

METHOD APPENDIX

discussion made them feel. These open responses helped inform the closed questions in the final survey. The pilot survey also included a question at the end asking for volunteers for interview. If participants chose to volunteer, they were asked to provide their Facebook username. I then used these usernames to search their participation in the comment threads and used the criteria outlined above to determine if they were suitable for interview. Twelve of the final Australian commenter interviewees were sourced through the pilot survey. The final survey (n = 306) was undertaken during July 2021 with 156 respondents from Australia and 150 from the United States. Participants were recruited using survey firm Qualtrics and were provided with an incentive for their participation. The respondents’ demographics are represented in Table A.3. As outlined in Table A.4, the respondents reflect a good range of self-­ nominated political affiliations, but do not reflect exact breakdowns in previous national elections in either country. You will note that for political orientation the largest percentages were those that nominated as a centralist. This may be easily explained through previous studies which find that when self-nominated, political orientation often clusters around the centre, but these individuals when compared in ideology often sit slightly either side—i.e. slightly left-of-­ centre and slightly right-of-centre (Bright 2018). In Table A.5, the commenting frequency is provided. Participants were disqualified from the data sample if they selected never as the option for commenting frequency. The survey questions probed respondents motivations for commenting following news stories and behaviours when involved in a debate. Respondents were also asked to nominate political orientation and rate of commenting using the same measures as those for the interviewees. Open responses were sought on how participants’ determine what is false information and how they determine what is a reputable news source. As a qualitative researcher, I designed my survey with very open-ended questions, with room for participants to reflect on motivations for commenting and their style of commenting. It is these responses that I heavily relied on to help examine the connection between fan-like behaviours and polarization.

151

  METHOD APPENDIX 

Table A.3  Survey demographics Demographic

Australia

United States

Age

Gender

18 - 24

12

10

25 - 34

36

14

35 - 44

50

24

45 - 54

23

10

55 - 64

13

34

65 - 74

17

46

75 - 84

4

10

85 or older

1

2

Male

64

87

Female

90

60

Other

2

3

Less than a high school diploma

9

2

GED)

44

29

Some college, no degree

39

31

Associate degree (e.g. AA, AS)

8

20

Bachelor's degree (e.g. BA, BS)

44

45

Master's degree (e.g. MA, MS, MEd)

10

17

2

6

High school degree or equivalent (e.g.

Education

Doctorate or professional degree (e.g. MD, DDS, PhD)

Table A.4  Survey demographics: Self-reported political orientation by country Political affiliation

United States Australia

Total

Very left-­ wing

Fairly left-­ wing

Slightly left-of-­ centre

Centre

Slightly right-of-­ centre

Fairly right-­ wing

Very right-­ wing

150

15

10

17

53

9

22

24

156

11

18

23

78

8

10

8

Commenting frequency on news stories

Total count More than 10 times a day Between 6 and 10 times a day Between 2 and 5 times a day Once a day 4–6 days a week 2–3 days a week Once a week Less often than once a week Once a month Less often than once a month

26 4 6 4 4 1 2 2 1 0 2

27 51 42 13 32 34 32 16 39

Very left-­wing

306 20

Total

3 3

1 2 2 5 2

7

2

28 1

Fairly left-­wing

1 10

6 2 2 6 1

8

3

40 1

Slightly left-of-­centre

9 17

19 4 13 16 14

22

11

131 6

Centre

1 0

3 1 4 1 5

0

1

17 1

Slightly right-of-­centre

Political affiliation

Table A.5  Political affiliation by comment frequency of survey respondents

1 4

4 1 6 3 3

6

2

32 2

Fairly right-­wing

1 3

5 2 3 1 6

4

2

32 5

Very right-­wing

152  METHOD APPENDIX

  METHOD APPENDIX 

153

Analysis I chose to use a hybrid thematic analysis (Fereday and Muir-Cochrane 2006) for the study. This hybrid incorporates both the data-driven inductive approach of Boyatzis (1998) and the deductive template coding approach outlined by Crabtree and Miller (1999) (see Table A.6). This approach allowed the tenets of fandom to be integral to the process of deductive thematic analysis, while also allowing for themes to emerge directly from the data using inductive coding. Drawing on Wheatley and Vatnoey’s (2020) approach to probing social media data, a ‘retroductive phase’ was also incorporated to allow the data to be reread for emerging themes. Finally, the analysis was concluded with a ‘corroborating’ phase (Fereday and Muir-Cochrane 2006). This allowed for relationships and patterns between themes to be explored and clustered into the final reported themes. Although outlined as a linear process, the analysis was reflexive and iterative (See Table A.3). Transcripts from interviews and open responses were imported into software program NVivo, which was used to code data and explore patterns throughout the analysis process. Patterns and themes were identified throughout each stage with continued memo-taking. When viewed through the interpretative lens of fan studies, the clear themes of identity performance (both individual and collective); the role of emotion and affective investment and the factors of pleasure entertainment and humour emerged from observations, interviews and survey responses. The themes outlined in Chap. 6 in relation to the role of ‘fake news’ or as I came to label ‘news the commenters choose to believe’ emerged inductively. I first noticed reference to news organisation Table A.6  Stages of thematic analysis Stage

Activity

Stage 1 Deductive

Data coded around the key tenets of fan-like behaviours as identified in the literature Inductive codes assigned that described a new theme observed in the text Data reread for examples of all themes including those that emerged inductively Existing categories grouped together by topic, further analysed and refined into the themes reported

Stage 2 Inductive Stage 3 Retroductive Stage 4 Corroborating

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METHOD APPENDIX

affiliation as a measure of not just ‘truth’, but performance of collective political identity, in my observations and later again in the interviews. I then incorporated specific survey questions focused on sources used in justifying an opinion in online discussion and processes for validating information.

A Couple of Final Notes My goal with this appendix is to outline the process of this research project as it unfolded. I have no doubt that there may be some that would advocate for a different approach or a focus on different participants. I hope that this text serves as a starting point for further examinations of these fan-like behaviours in the performance of political identity and participation in online discussion. I would emphasise that given that an interpretative lens of fan studies has been used for this research, the methods used follow this rich tradition of qualitative audience or reception research. There is no claim to representativeness in the interviewees, in who were chosen or in the selection of those quoted. Quotes chosen in the book are used as illustrative examples of the themes that emerged. While, as noted above, my detailed observations of news comment threads on Facebook inform this study, it is not an ethnographic study and my contact with interviewees was momentary. Instead, I sought to solicit a range of responses and look for themes and patterns. The surveys were small by quantitative standards, but were designed to be representative of basic demographics. Incorporating the survey helped explore the themes that emerged in the interviews, and, to provide a different timepoint and further responses for examination. Given the difficulty in recruiting interviewees, open responses in a survey format provided a method for reaching a larger number of participants. It is important to also recognise the role that social desirability may have played in participant responses. Social desirability can be a particularly powerful motivator in topics such as politics and socially acceptable behaviour (such as that which might be conducted in online discussion) and as Nelson and Lewis (2021) note may lead respondents to answer in a way that they think reflect what researchers want to hear. This means that they may not be completely transparent about their actual feelings for a political affiliation or how they conduct themselves in online political discussion. Because a large part of the data collected was via interviews,

  METHOD APPENDIX 

155

there is a chance that the participants felt compelled to answer in a way that I, the interviewer, wanted them to. However, data was collected via anonymous survey as well, so this may have been mitigated to a certain extent. Overall, however, I would like to follow the lead of Nelson and Lewis (2021) and acknowledge that the findings outlined here are only what participants claim they feel about their political affiliation and behaviours in online political discussion and may not represent their actual feelings or behaviours. However, even these claims reveal a great deal about participatory politics. Even if their interest and investment are exaggerated, it helps us uncover the complex individual processes that help inform contemporary politics. Likewise, even if their assessments of their own behaviours are more favourable than an objective outsider may make, it tells us a lot about their beliefs and values in what is needed in a productive online discussion.

References

Barberá, Pablo. 2015. Birds of the Same Feather Tweet Together: Bayesian Ideal Point Estimation Using Twitter Data. Political Analysis 23 (1): 76–91. https:// doi.org/10.1093/pan/mpu011. Berger, Arthur Asa. 2014. Media and Communication Research Methods: An Introduction to Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. Boyatzis, Richard E. 1998. Transforming Qualitative Information: Thematic Analysis and Code Development. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. boyd, danah. 2014. It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. Yale University Press. Bright, Jonathan. 2018. Explaining the Emergence of Political Fragmentation on Social Media: The Role of Ideology and Extremism. Journal of Computer-­ Mediated Communication 23 (1): 17–33. https://doi.org/10.1093/ jcmc/zmx002. Bump, Philip. 2019. Trump Is the Most Polarizing President on Record—and Almost Nobody’s Opinion of Him Is Changing. The Washington Post. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/16/trump-­is-­most-­polarizing-­ president-­record-­almost-­nobodys-­opinion-­him-­is-­changing/. Conover, Michael, Jacob Ratkiewicz, Matthew Francisco, Bruno Gonçalves, Filippo Menczer, and Alessandro Flammini. 2011. Political Polarization on Twitter. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 5:89–96.

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Crabtree, Benjamin F., and William L. Miller. 1999. A Template Approach to Text Analysis: Developing and Using Codebooks. In Doing Qualitative Research, ed. Benjamin F. Crabtree and William L. Miller, 163–177. SAGE Publications. Crosson, Jesse M., and George Tsebelis. 2021. Multiple Vote Electoral Systems: A Remedy for Political Polarization. Journal of European Public Policy. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2021.1901962/SUPPL_FILE/ RJPP_A_1901962_SM6173.DOCX. Fereday, Jennifer, and Eimear Muir-Cochrane. 2006. Demonstrating Rigor Using Thematic Analysis: A Hybrid Approach of Inductive and Deductive Coding and Theme Development. International Journal of Qualitative Methods 5 (1): 80–92. https://doi.org/10.1177/160940690600500107. Gerrard, Ysabel. 2017. ‘It’s a Secret Thing’: Digital Disembedding through Online Teen Drama Fandom. First Monday. Iyengar, Shanto, Yphtach Lelkes, Matthew Levendusky, Neil Malhotra, and Sean J. Westwood. 2019. The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States. Annual Review of Political Science 22: 129–146. Lever, Annabelle. 2010. Compulsory Voting: A Critical Perspective. British Journal of Political Science 40 (4): 897–915. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy. usc.edu.au:2048/stable/40930591. Markham, Annette, and Elizabeth Buchanan. 2012. Ethical Decision-Making and Internet Research: Version 2.0. Recommendations from the AoIR Ethics Working Committee. Available Online: Aoir. https://aoir.org/reports/ ethics2.pdf. Miguel, Cristina. 2016. Visual Intimacy on Social Media: From Selfies to the Co-Construction of Intimacies Through Shared Pictures. Social Media + Society 2 (2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116641705. Nelson, Jacob L, and Seth C Lewis. 2021. Only ‘Sheep’ Trust Journalists? How Citizens’ Self-Perceptions Shape Their Approach to News. New Media & Society, https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211018160. Newman, Nic, Richard Fletcher, Anne Schulz, Simge Andi, Craig T Roberston, and Rasmus K Nielsen. 2020. Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2020. Papacharissi, Zizi. 2004. Democracy Online: Civility, Politeness, and the Democratic Potential of Online Political Discussion Groups. New Media & Society 6 (2): 259–283. Park, Sora, Caroline Fisher, Kieran McGuinness, Jee Young Lee, and Kerry McCallum. 2021. Digital News Report: Australia 2021. Canberra. https:// apo.org.au/node/312650. Settle, Jaime E. 2018. Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America. Cambridge University Press.

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Singh, Shane P. 2019. Politically Unengaged, Distrusting, and Disaffected Individuals Drive the Link Between Compulsory Voting and Invalid Balloting. Political Science Research and Methods 7 (1): 107–123. https://doi. org/10.1017/psrm.2017.11. Stroud, Natalie Jomini, Joshua M.  Scacco, Ashley Muddiman, and Alexander L.  Curry. 2015. Changing Deliberative Norms on News Organizations’ Facebook Sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 20 (2): 188–203. Tucker, Joshua A, Andrew Guess, Pablo Barberá, Cristian Vaccari, Alexandra Siegel, Sergey Sanovich, Denis Stukal, and Brendan Nyhan. 2018. Social Media, Political Polarization, and Political Disinformation: A Review of the Scientific Literature. Political Polarization, and Political Disinformation: A Review of the Scientific Literature, March 19. Wheatley, Dawn, and Eirik Vatnoey. 2020. ‘It’s Twitter, a Bear Pit, Not a Debating Society’: A Qualitative Analysis of Contrasting Attitudes towards Social Media Blocklists. New Media & Society 22 (1): 5–25. https://doi. org/10.1177/1461444819858278.

Index1

A Abbott, Tony, 76 ABC News, 108, 143, 145, 146, 148 Activism, 51–53, 93 Affect, 5, 9, 40, 53, 54, 71, 72 Affective contagion, 28, 75, 133 Affective engagement, 40–42, 47, 51, 82 Affective investment, see Investment Affective polarization, 14, 16–21, 47 Affective practice, 6, 8, 20, 28, 71, 75, 114, 115, 123, 131 Algorithm, 13, 21 Anger, 6, 16, 19, 28, 40, 70–76, 83 Anonymity, 24, 87n2, 145 Anti-fan, 6, 9, 37–55, 71, 75, 79, 80, 82, 93, 133 Audience, 6, 15, 28, 39–41, 43, 45, 50, 52, 54, 66, 111, 112, 118, 121, 123, 136, 141, 154 imagined, 45

B Behaviours offline, 108, 148 online, 5, 9, 10, 14, 20, 49, 53, 62, 68, 72, 76, 77, 82, 88, 113, 124, 132, 142, 146, 148, 154, 155 Belonging, 20, 25, 29, 39, 43–45, 53, 64, 70, 71, 133–135 See also Identity Blogs, 41, 90 Bourdieu, Pierre, 66, 79, 98 Boyd, Danah, 27, 144 Brexit, 1 Bruns, Axel, 112, 132 C CNN, 87, 89, 143, 148 Collective action, 27 Commenting, 4, 9, 14, 28, 41, 42, 52, 55, 62, 64–66, 68, 72, 75, 77,

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Barnes, Fandom and Polarization in Online Political Discussion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14039-6

161

162 

INDEX

79, 90, 108, 115, 119, 141–143, 146, 148, 150 Community/communities fan, 9, 38, 39, 43–46, 51, 53, 80 imagined, 44, 45, 48, 55, 65, 81 life cycle, 97–99, 102, 146 online, 97, 98 sense of, 43, 44, 78 Conservative, 3, 15, 17, 20, 42, 48, 49, 61, 64, 65, 67, 76, 90, 93, 112, 116, 120 Conspiracy theories, 10, 53, 109, 124, 133 Convergence, 51 Cross-cutting discussion, 21, 22, 25 Cultist, 41, 42, 82 Cultural capital, 79, 98 Curation, 99 D Deliberation, 2, 7, 9, 10, 23–29, 62, 83 Democrat, 15, 37, 48, 81, 101, 110 Disembedding, 100–102 Disinformation, 8, 10, 107–110, 112, 121, 122, 132–134 Dislike, 6–7, 9, 14, 16, 46–51, 66, 71, 75, 76, 79, 82, 83, 135, 136 E Echo chamber, 21–23, 28, 88, 89, 112, 132 Emotion, 4–7, 14, 16, 19, 23–28, 40, 52, 63, 70–76, 81–83, 89, 93, 95, 96, 113, 124, 132, 133, 153 Engaged listeners, 136 See also Lurkers/lurking Engagement, 5, 7, 10, 20, 23, 39–42, 44, 47, 49–52, 54, 71, 76–78, 81, 82, 88, 90, 91, 93, 96–98, 100, 121, 124, 130, 134–136, 148 Enthusiast, 41, 42, 82

F Facebook, 8, 9, 14, 23, 28, 29, 42, 62, 68, 74, 79, 81, 87–89, 92, 94, 95, 99–101, 103, 108, 111, 121, 143–146, 148, 150, 154 groups, 2, 10, 83, 87, 144–145, 148 Fake news, 10, 103, 107–124, 153 See also Disinformation; Misinformation Fan communities, see Community/ communities Filter bubbles, 21–23, 28, 112 Flagging, 135 Fox news, 49, 87, 89, 112, 117, 118, 143, 148 G Gibbs, Anne, 28, 72, 75, 133 Gift economy, 98 Gray, Jonathan, 6, 7, 40, 44–51, 66, 71, 75, 76, 78, 135, 137 H Habermas, Jürgen, 24, 25, 130 Harassment, 6, 95 Hills, Matt, 39, 40, 43, 45, 75, 98, 102 I Identity belonging and, 29, 45, 70, 135 collective, 5, 9, 25, 26, 45, 47, 55, 65, 69, 70, 136 construction of, 16, 94 political, 3–6, 10, 16, 63, 65–67, 81, 101, 103, 108, 109, 113, 115, 116, 118, 120, 122, 123, 131, 133, 141, 144, 146, 154 social, 15–17, 19, 49, 112

 INDEX 

Ideological polarization, 13–16 Imagined community, see Community/communities Investment, 2, 3, 5, 8–10, 28, 29, 38–40, 43, 44, 51, 52, 55, 63, 70–76, 80, 81, 83, 90, 91, 93, 94, 99, 102, 103, 110, 113, 115, 116, 123, 129–136, 141–143, 153, 155 J Jane, Emma, 6 Jenkins, Henry, 38, 39, 43–45, 50–52, 54, 72, 91, 110, 121, 135 L Liberal, 3, 15, 17, 18, 20, 25, 42, 48–50, 61, 65, 76, 112, 120 Listeners, 135–136 See also Engaged listeners Listening, 65, 67, 117 Lurkers/lurking, 42 M Malinformation, 109 Misinformation, 13, 72, 93, 108, 109, 111, 112, 133 Moderation labour, 94 policies, 146 Morrison, Scott, 76, 79 Mouffe, Chantel, 25–28, 135 Murdoch, Rupert, 68, 117 N Narrative/s group, 44, 45, 51, 64, 65, 67, 78, 81, 130, 131 shared, 44, 45, 78, 130

163

News, 1–4, 6–9, 15, 21–23, 28, 37, 41, 43, 47, 49, 54, 62, 67, 72, 75, 81, 82, 88, 89, 91, 92, 94, 98, 107, 108, 110–116, 118–120, 123, 124, 134, 136, 141, 143–150, 153, 154 News.com.au, 79, 108, 119, 143, 146 Newscorp, see News.com.au; Murdoch, Rupert Non-fan, see Anti-fan Norms, 7, 94, 97–99, 121, 131 P Papacharissi, Zizi, 5, 20, 23, 24, 27, 28, 72, 135, 146 Paratexts, 46, 47 Participatory behaviour, see Behaviours Participatory culture, 53 Performance, 2, 3, 5, 9, 10, 14, 16, 17, 20, 21, 27, 29, 38, 40, 44–48, 51, 55, 62–71, 76, 79, 81–83, 93, 102, 108, 109, 113, 116, 118–124, 129–133, 136, 153, 154 Pleasure and play, 81 Political apathy, 25, 134 fragmentation, 1, 21–23, 28 talk, 4–5, 23, 27, 28, 89, 136 Politics of against, 6, 48, 75, 82, 93, 115–117, 123 Populism, 18–21, 26, 29, 43 Power, 5, 19, 27, 39, 43, 50, 52, 66, 98, 99, 131, 132, 141 Practices online, 6, 20, 51, 75, 79, 97, 114, 131 Productivity enunciative, 41, 90 semiotic, 41, 43, 90 textual, 41–43, 90, 91

164 

INDEX

Q QAnon, 53, 133 R Republican, 15, 17, 37, 48, 81, 110 Rhetoric, 18–20, 29, 47, 52, 93, 130, 143 S Sandvoss, Cornel, 5, 6, 38–42, 45–48, 52, 63, 65, 71, 75, 82, 90, 93, 118, 130, 132, 136 Selective attention, 134 Selective exposure, 21, 134 Self creation of, 65 performance of, 3, 10, 17, 29, 46, 62, 64, 65, 71, 76, 81–83, 119, 123, 129–131 Social capital, 98 Social media, 1, 4, 8, 9, 13, 14, 17, 18, 21–24, 27–29, 37, 39, 47, 62, 74, 94, 98, 100–102, 110–113, 121, 124, 129, 143, 153 Spreadability, 111, 121, 133 Spreadable media, 121 Stanfill, Mel, 46, 50, 51, 53, 132–134 Symbolic capital, 98

T Textual poaching, 91 Ties strong, 100, 101, 120 weak, 22 Transmedia, 53, 133, 135 Transparency, 96, 145 Trolls/trolling, 7, 78, 88, 95, 145 Trump, Donald, 1, 19, 37, 44, 51, 61, 66, 70, 75, 76, 80, 87, 98, 141–143 Twitter, 8, 22, 67 V Values, 3, 20, 25, 26, 46, 64, 65, 67–69, 71, 81, 91, 93, 95–99, 101, 102, 120, 130, 131, 145, 155 Voting, 142, 146 W White supremacy, 53, 133, 134 Y YouTube, 115