Digital Islamophobia

The rise of far-right communities on digital platforms is a global crisis. Digital Islamophobia tracks far-right groups where they are a virtual and vicious threat, exploring how these networks grow, develop, and circulate Islamophobic hate-speech on Twitter. Reconstructing this media ecosystem, Digital Islamophobia traces the reactionary political ideologies animating these groups through feminist data analytic techniques in a transnational study of German and American far-right, digitally networked users.

This work illustrates far-right communities using data visualization techniques, identifies a taxonomy of user-types, analyzes themes and stories that motivate far-right users, and tracks the spread of linked forms of anti-Muslim sentiment, reactionary ideologies, and (mis)information. In doing so, Digital Islamophobia details how far-right discourse is not merely national, or even transatlantic, but increasingly transnationalized among American, German, as well as Indian and Nigerian digital networks. By tracking and tracing the contours of these far-right digital communities on Twitter and analyzing the content of their conversations, Digital Islamophobia provides policy-makers, researchers, and scholars with a potential road-map to stop them.

Emily Lynell Edwards is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and Educational Technologist at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, NY. Edwards currently serves as co-director of the grant Digital Humanities Across the Curriculum (DHAC), funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). She is also a General Editor at Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ). Her research focuses on the intersection of digital medias, technologies, and platforms, and far-right politics, race, and gender in global contexts. Her work has appeared in journals such as New Media & Society, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and Glocalism: Journal of culture, politics and innovation.