FROM ISIS TO MAGA: PRO-TRUMP DISINFORMATION DURING THE TWITTER AFTERMATH OF THE 2017 TERRORIST ATTACKS IN FIVE MEGACITIES

Abstract

Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter since October 27, 2022, and now X, waited less than a month after acquiring the social media company for $44 billion, to lift Donald Trump’s ban from the platform: "The people have spoken," Musk the promoter of democracy tweeted, saying that 51.8% of more than 15 million Twitter users voted for the ban to be lifted. Former President Donald Trump was suspended, due to the risk of incitement of violence, after his supporters stormed the US Capitol in Washington DC on 6 January 2021. Twitter is one of the most dominant platforms for political communication, and its prior use by Donald Trump supporters, considering recent historical events is, therefore, of significant interest. This study critically investigates Twitter discourses on terrorist attacks in five megacities around the world (Paris, London, St. Petersburg, Manhattan, and Las Vegas) related to the group ISIS in 2017. The goal is to uncover social media’s integral role in crisis discourses as enablers of societal reactions to disruptive events and developments. The analysis deploys digital methods on a large Twitter corpus via the tool NodeXL. The analysis is two-fold: on one hand, it screens the networks of the entities participating in the different Twitter discourses; on the other, it maps the semantic networks for a tentative content-/framing analysis of recurring themes and arguments in the respective Twitter content. Our study finds that the evolution of the populist far/alt right discourse and the development of Trump supporter networks on Twitter coincided with this spate of terrorist attacks, which in turn fed populist alt-right Trump supporters within an environment that enabled users to boost their social media power, discourse, and networks.