Are Alternative Social Networks Effective at Identity Formation?

I recently had the opportunity to attend the University of California Santa Barbara’s Research Mentorship Program (RMP) which is a 6-week immersive interdisciplinary research program with projects ranging from the natural sciences to humanities. During my time at RMP, I further delved into the fields of Digital Anthropology and Science, Technology, and Society (STS), analyzing identity formation on the conservative alternative network Gab. I sought to understand whether online networks, especially conservative alternative networks, are successful builders of both self and group identity.

With this project, I was able to understand identity formation, both online and offline, and how both self-presentation and community building are affected by the chosen mode of communication. Using both a theoretical approach, through a comparison of existing theories such as social identity theory and narrative identity, and a technical approach, through a digital ethnography, analyzing Gab’s online environment, I was able to develop a further understanding of how and why certain users and communities interact and inevitably group together. Ethnography is central to the field of anthropology and other social sciences, where researchers immerse themselves to observe and analyze a specific community with first-hand experience. In this case, to conduct digital ethnography, I went directly into the Gab account as a user and analyzed post content, comment content, user and feature data, language, and other features to understand the Gab community in-depth.

I found that the social identity theory, developed by Polish psychologist Henri Tajfel in the 1970s, correlates significantly with Gab’s environment. Its tenets of self-categorization and prototype relate to Gab through its group features, where users create in-groups and out-groups within the network, and development of user personas, where users create a sort of character through network accounts to present rather than their multifaceted self. These aspects also allow for Gab to house countless echo chambers of extremist right-wing ideas, as many of these groups and personas allow for users to immerse themselves in communities that continuously output conspiracist and hateful views, contributing to the acute amount of hate speech and ideals. With this finding, I conclude that Gab, as well as other social networks — alternative or mainstream, are extremely effective at building identity, both of group and of self. By understanding identity formation, we can understand whether the online world and cyberspace either differ or truly correspond to the real world and how our sense of self and others is subsequently affected.

The culminating research paper is linked below complete with a research abstract and citations.

Acting on the Cyber-Stage: Conservative Online Identity Within Alternative Social Networks.

Download • 479KB

Cover image by Kasia Bojanowska on Dribbble.