TY - JOUR
T1 - Playing with the news on Reddit: The politics game on r/The_Donald
AU - Topinka, Robert
AU - Osborne-Carey, Cassian
AU - Finlayson, Alan
N1 - Funder Information: This article was written as part of the research project “Political Ideology, Rhetoric and Aesthetics in the Twenty-First Century: The Case of the ‘Alt-Right’,’’ funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/R001197/1).
PY - 2024/6
Y1 - 2024/6
N2 - Research into online forms of far-right, alt-right, populist, and supremacist politics has raised questions about the extent to which social media enables or constitutes extremist affects and ideologies. Building on this research and through a case study of how a pro-Trump community on Reddit made sense of news events and sought to contest their representation, this paper explores the relationship between games and politics, arguing that digital platforms encourage people to apprehend, interpret, and contest political ideas and information as if engaged in a kind of videogame. We show how the group sought to manipulate platform affordances, waging a kind of Info War rooted in an understanding of politics as a pure space of conflict. We show how social media orients people to politics, phenomenologically, through the logics, structures and narratives of online games and argue that this affects not only online behaviors but more general apprehensions of politics.
AB - Research into online forms of far-right, alt-right, populist, and supremacist politics has raised questions about the extent to which social media enables or constitutes extremist affects and ideologies. Building on this research and through a case study of how a pro-Trump community on Reddit made sense of news events and sought to contest their representation, this paper explores the relationship between games and politics, arguing that digital platforms encourage people to apprehend, interpret, and contest political ideas and information as if engaged in a kind of videogame. We show how the group sought to manipulate platform affordances, waging a kind of Info War rooted in an understanding of politics as a pure space of conflict. We show how social media orients people to politics, phenomenologically, through the logics, structures and narratives of online games and argue that this affects not only online behaviors but more general apprehensions of politics.
KW - Gaming, Reddit, politics, ideology, Trump, social media
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85194928513&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1093/ips/olae015
DO - 10.1093/ips/olae015
M3 - Article
VL - 18
JO - International Political Sociology
JF - International Political Sociology
SN - 1749-5679
IS - 2
M1 - olae015
ER -
