Malevolent Creativity and Social Media: Creating Anti-immigration Communities on Twitter

This paper examines the role played by malevolent linguistic creativity in the generation and maintenance of anti-immigration communities on Twitter. In order to understand this phenomenon, we combined data science and qualitative techniques for the analysis of 112,789 pro- and anti-immigration tweets with a focus on their hashtags. Our analysis pointed to the fact that anti-immigration users on this social media platform have a distinct behavior and employ a series of specific strategies in creating echo chambers online. One of these strategies has to do with the use of new words and slogan variations which have a clear identity function and serve the pragmatic purpose of building community. Some reflections on the relation between creativity and social media are offered at the end.