Playing with the news on Reddit: The politics game on r/The_Donald

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Topinka, Robert, Osborne-Carey, Cassian and Finlayson, Alan ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3939-349X (2024) Playing with the news on Reddit: The politics game on r/The_Donald. International Political Sociology, 18 (2). 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 videogame. 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 behaviors but more general apprehensions of politics.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: Funder Information: This article was written as part of the research project “Political Ideology, Rhetoric and Aesthetics in the Twenty-First Century: The Case of the ‘Alt-Right’,’’ funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/R001197/1).
Uncontrolled Keywords: gaming, reddit, politics, ideology, trump, social media,sociology and political science,political science and international relations,communication,sdg 16 - peace, justice and strong institutions,3* ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3300/3312
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies
UEA Research Groups: Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Policy & Politics
Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Cultural Politics, Communications & Media
Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Political, Social and International Studies
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Depositing User: LivePure Connector
Date Deposited: 08 Apr 2024 15:30
Last Modified: 18 Jun 2024 08:30
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/94862
DOI: 10.1093/ips/olae015

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