Toxic Social Media: Affective Polarization After Feminist Protests

Abstract

The objective of this article is to conceptualize affective polarization beyond partisan politics to instead analyze the ways in which women’s affective political participation is subject to toxic discipline. While a lot of focus has been placed on affective politics as mechanisms for governance, little has been done regarding affective polarization after feminist protest. In this article, we bridge two bodies of literature—affective politics and political polarization—by proposing the notion of affective polarization. We focused on the case of a series of feminist mobilizations that took place to fight back against the impunity of police violence in Mexico. We conducted a mixed-method approach that combines, on one hand, quantitative analysis of data strand tweets encompassing #EllasNoMeRepresentan (TheyDoNotRepresentMe) (N = 17,698) and #EllasSiMeRepresentan (TheyDoRepresentMe) (N = 6700) and, on the other hand, a qualitative analysis of 500 tweets of each hashtag. The results of the study revealed the existence of polarization that aims at disciplining the affective political participation of women. Almost half of our data contain negative sentiments. The toxic tweets include corrective threats, such as incitation to sexual violence, murder, hate against feminism, and patronizing discourses about how women should protest. We thus conclude that while it is true that social media has amplified feminist mobilization, it has also led to an increase of digital violence. With these findings, the article contributes to a better understanding of both feminist affective politics and its disciplining governing mechanisms in a patriarchal social media.