Elizabeth Poole

Countering Islamophobia online: Exploring the potential and limitations of counter-narratives about Muslims on Twitter 

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Online platforms have the affordances to contest Islamophobic disinformation and hate speech as demonstrated by the dynamics of #stopIslam following the Brussels terror attack, 2016. In this instance, the hashtag gained its prominence through the contestations of users who sought to question, critique and undermine its original message (Poole et al, 2020). However, research has also shown the limitations of social media for online activism, in particular for creating meaningful debates or change (Schradie, 2019). This paper examines data from a large-scale study that used methods of computational, quantitative, and qualitative analysis to examine the representation of Islam and Muslims in the case of Brexit (2020), the Christchurch terror attack (2019) and the Covid Pandemic (2020). Following Fraser’s (1990) definition of counter-publics as constructing alternative narratives that may not be in line with mainstream debate, we will examine the dynamics of counter-narratives to disinformation about Islam and Muslims in relation to these three case studies, and ask whether the high incidence of solidarity discourses in these datasets are limited to acts of counter-speech (and other performative acts, Ernst et al, 2017) or if they contribute to sustainable counter-narratives that have implications for wider discursive knowledge about Muslims. The analysis shows the varying ways in which would-be allies attack Islamophobia, through supportive speech-acts, for example, but also the limitations to challenging Islamophobia within this social media context.