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Tweeting Islamophobia: Islamophobic Hate Speech Amongst Followers of UK Political Parties on Twitter

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Tweeting Islamophobia: Islamophobic Hate Speech Amongst Followers of UK Political Parties on Twitter Tweeting Islamophobia: Islamophobic hate speech amongst followers of UK political parties on Twitter Bertram Vidgen Wolfson College, University of Oxford Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of DPhil in Information, Communication and the Social Sciences in the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford Supervisors Dr Taha Yasseri (Oxford Internet Institute & Alan Turing Institute) Prof Helen Margetts OBE (Oxford Internet Institute & Alan Turing Institute) January 2019 Words: 99,609 Bertram Vidgen Tweeting Islamophobia Acknowledgments I always thought that writing the Acknowledgments would be tricky – Who should I include? How can I express my gratitude in so few words? What specifically should I thank everyone for? But it turns out my concerns were misplaced. Although many people have been incredibly helpful, writing these acknowledgments has been very easy. I would like to express genuine gratitude to my supervisors, Dr. Taha Yasseri and Prof. Helen Margetts OBE, for your help, support and insights, and for your roles in my academic development. It has been a privilege working with you, and through your supervision I have learnt more than I ever anticipated when I started my PhD. Taha, you have provided incredible and incisive input across all of the methods, analysis and interpretation – the computational aspect of this work would simply not be possible without you. Helen, you have helped to mould this PhD and drive the theoretical arguments. Your critical insights and ability to identify the real value in any analysis are second to none. I appreciate all of the time you have each put in to this project, and I sincerely look forward to working with both of you in the future. I would like to thank my three assessors from Transfer, Confirmation and Viva: Prof. Matt Williams, Dr. Jonathan Bright and Dr. Michael Biggs. I have hugely appreciated discussing my work with each of you and your input has been incredibly valuable in developing and honing the focus of my PhD. A special thanks also goes out to Dr. Scott Hale, who has not been formally involved in this work but has offered some excellent advice and guidance throughout, and Prof. Marie Gillespie, who has really helped to shape a jumble of ideas into a full thesis. Many peers have helped me with this PhD, from annotating tweets to advising on style to identifying relevant papers to read. I would like to thank each of you for your help and thoughts – I hope I have, and can again in the future, reciprocate! In particular, thanks to Suzanne van Geuns for reading the fifth chapter and providing such discerning feedback. But over the past year one person stands out for having been unceasingly constructive, supportive and helpful: Margie Cheesman, your thoughts and insights have been transformative. I cannot express how wonderful you have been. 2 Bertram Vidgen Tweeting Islamophobia The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) is made up of many excellent researchers – many of whom I respect and have learnt a great deal from. In particular, Prof. Vicky Nash and Prof. Gina Neff have been motivational and inspiring, as both leaders and researchers. The OII is also made up of many excellent non-research staff who have truly made my PhD far easier and more enjoyable than it would have been otherwise. There are too many to list – but, in particular, Duncan, Emily, David, Ornella, Tim, Victoria, Laura and Jordan, thank you so much for all of your work. Thanks also to the ESRC for their generous funding, the Alan Turing Institute for funding and technical assistance, and to Wolfson College for its support. I’d especially like to thank my family. Theo, you have been fantastic in your support and interest, and I really hope to one day repay all of your kindness. Dad, you have been instrumental in my journey towards completing a PhD – from encouraging me to do one in the first place to helping at some pivotal moments in the research and writeup. Mum, at 27 years old it still amazes me how much you help me with every part of my life, PhD included! I cannot thank you all enough. As much as anything else, this PhD is a product of your (collective) unwavering support. Completing a PhD has been one of the biggest undertakings of my life. There have been some (i.e. many) difficult times and some (i.e. very many!) immensely gratifying moments. Throughout all of it, I have felt extremely privileged to study at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Alan Turing Institute, both of which are fantastic interdisciplinary institutions. I could not imagine completing this research anywhere else. Thank you to everyone for all of your incredible help! 3 Bertram Vidgen Tweeting Islamophobia Dedication This thesis is dedicated to my parents, Richard and Heather. 4 Bertram Vidgen Tweeting Islamophobia Abstract The great promise of social media platforms such as Twitter is to connect people separated across time and space. This has had far-ranging consequences for politics by changing discursive, participative and organisational practices. However, despite much early techno-optimism about platforms like Twitter, concerns are growing that they enable harmful, hateful and divisive behaviours. In this thesis, I focus on one of the most concerning and harmful behaviours on Twitter and in politics more broadly: Islamophobic hate speech. The socio-political consequences of hate speech are deeply concerning, and include causing harm to targeted victims, spreading divisiveness, and normalizing dangerous and extremist ideas. The aim of this thesis is to enhance our understanding of the nature and dynamics of Islamophobic hate speech amongst followers of UK political parties on Twitter. I study four parties from across the political spectrum: the BNP, UKIP, the Conservatives and Labour. I make three main contributions. first, I define Islamophobia in terms of negativity and generality, thus making a robust, theoretically-informed contribution to the study of a deeply contested concept. This argument informs the second contribution, which is methodological: I create a multi-class supervised machine learning classifier for Islamophobic hate speech. This distinguishes between weak and strong varieties and can be applied robustly and at scale. My third contribution is theoretical. Drawing together my substantive findings, I argue that Islamophobic tweeting amongst followers of UK parties can be characterised as a wind system which contains Islamophobic hurricanes. This analogy captures the complex, heterogeneous dynamics underpinning Islamophobia on Twitter, and highlights its devastating effects. I also show that Islamist terrorist attacks drive Islamophobia, and that this affects followers of all four parties studied here. I use this finding to extend the theory of cumulative extremism beyond extremist groups to include individuals with mainstream affiliations. These contributions feed into ongoing academic, policymaking and activist discussions about Islamophobic hate speech in both social media and UK politics. 5 Bertram Vidgen Tweeting Islamophobia Table of Contents DEDICATION ..................................................................................................................... 4 LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................... 10 LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................. 12 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ............................................................................................... 14 CHAPTER 1 | INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................... 16 1.1 | Structure ................................................................................................................ 21 CHAPTER 2 | LITERATURE REVIEW ............................................................................... 25 2.1 | Islamophobia ......................................................................................................... 26 2.2 | Islamophobia within UK political parties .......................................................... 42 2.2.1 | Islamophobia in the far right .................................................................. 44 2.2.2 | Mainstream politics and Islamophobia ................................................... 51 2.2.3 | UKIP and Islamophobia ......................................................................... 54 2.3 | Theories of Islamophobia ..................................................................................... 58 2.3.1 | Contact and conflict ................................................................................ 59 2.3.2 | Economics .............................................................................................. 60 2.3.3 | Individual psychology ............................................................................ 61 2.3.4 | Social interactions ................................................................................... 62 2.3.5 | Cumulative extremism ............................................................................ 65 2.4 | Studying Islamophobia on social media ............................................................. 74 2.5 | Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 76 CHAPTER 3 | RESEARCH APPROACH, METHODS, DATA AND ETHICS ............................ 78 3.1 | Research approach
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