Playing with the news on Reddit: the politics game on r/The_Donald
Topinka, Robert and Osborne-Carey, C. and Finlyason, A. (2024) Playing with the news on Reddit: the politics game on r/The_Donald. International Political Sociology 18 (2), olae015. ISSN 1749-5679.
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Abstract
Research into online forms of far-right, alt-right, populist and supremacist politics has raised questions about the extent to which social media enables or constitutes extremist affects and ideologies. Building on this research, and through a case study of how a pro-Trump community on Reddit made sense of news events and sought to contest their representation, this paper explores the relationship between games and politics, arguing that digital platforms encourage people to apprehend, interpret and contest political ideas and information as if engaged in a kind of video game. We show how the group sought to manipulate platform affordances, waging a kind of Info War rooted in an understanding of politics as a pure space of conflict. We show how social media orients people to politics, phenomenologically, through the logics, structures and narratives of online games and argue that this affects not only online behaviours but more general apprehensions of politics.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication |
| Depositing User: | Robert Topinka |
| Date Deposited: | 09 May 2024 12:50 |
| Last Modified: | 09 Jun 2024 00:10 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/53517 |
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