The Twitter View of the Islamophobic “Identitarian Movement”

Twitter as one of the fastest opinion generating platforms among social networks, provides a range of appearances concerning the “social” with both positive and negative facets. In social networks, individuals who construct the appearances in question are positioned with various types of topology: the patterns generated as a result of the observation and analysis of structural communities formed as per each other as well as on the contrary to their self, allow the discovery of certain aspects of social reality. We can therefore argue that social media plays an important role in deciding the context of people’s reality, particularly when we think that the community in which people live is highly decisive in terms of functionality during the formation of opinions. In this context, the study aimed to investigate the relationship form of Islamophobia profiles through the Twitter representation of the Identitarian Movement and to examine the capacity of identical ideas to affect the formation of opinions in the real world. The data gathered from the accounts of Islamophobic and racist social network actors constitute the starting point of the analysis. Social network analysis based on who is associated with whom and to what extent has been applied along with computer algorithms to better visualize the data gathered meaningfully. As a result, how the members of the sample group of this study interacted in the media and the pattern of appearance of various social groups on Twitter were unveiled. Consequently, the analysis showed that racist actors, who are in intense contact with each other, have distinct capacities that can be interpreted purely on the basis of their network appearances: When these capacities, which align with the resources of the media platform, such as the influencing opinions, the creation of agendas and the coordination of actions in a short period, are coupled with the intellectual profiles of the actors, they represent an important domain of activity.