Your feed, my identity: the politics of gendered narratives in the online space

Title (eng)
Your feed, my identity: the politics of gendered narratives in the online space
Author
Andrea Forero Cañizares
Author
Dawit Gebresilassie
Author
Jenny Jiyeon Kim
Author
Kaela van der Vaart
Author
Roberta Ramos
Description (eng)
This report explores how social media, particularly X (formerly Twitter), is used to shape gender-based political discourse, and how this contributes to ideological polarization in the context of the 2024 U.S. Presidential election. Using a transdisciplinary approach, we triangulated data from desk research, a qualitative survey of voters’ experiences, social media scraping of hashtags (#MAGA, #TradWife, #YourBodyMyChoice), and expert interviews from fields including computational social science, social media research, and online extremism. Our findings reveal that gender serves as a powerful ideological an¬chor around which political identities form, where social media can act as an accelerant to these processes, albeit not a causal relationship. We identify specific themes around which this relationship is explored, including the employment of ‘traditional roles’, the spectrum of feminism being redefined, the collapse of boundaries be¬tween online and offline spaces, the predominantly emotional na¬ture of gender-based political discourse as well as the mechanisms through which platform architectures can influence polarization. The report concludes with evidence-based intervention pathways addressing platform and algorithm design, human moderation, and community-based digital literacy approaches to mitigate harmful polarization while preserving democratic deliberation.
Keywords (eng)
Gendered political discourseSocial media polarizationAlgorithmic amplificationPlatform governanceU.S. presidential election 2024Online harassmentIdentity politicsTransdisciplinary research
Type (eng)
report
Language
[eng]
Persistent identifier
https://door.donau-uni.ac.at/o:6056
Publication
2025
License
All rights reserved