Discourse and collective identity in online resistance communities: Theoretical and computational insights

This paper offers a comparative perspective into the discourse of two online communities on the forum social media platform Reddit: r/antiwork, a group focused on the issues faced by workers with largely anti-capitalist sentiments, and r/TwoXchromosomes, a space for discussions of women’s struggles with anti-patriarchal views. We argue that these communities constitute a distinct digital form of political engagement and activism as resistance groups.using the concept of everyday resistance. That means using a set of small-scale, small-impact actions undertaken to contest power relations in a covert and unorganised manner. The data for this study comprises of 84,230 Reddit posts spanning 13 years and was analysed using topic models based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). The findings demonstrate that discussions in both communities there are strong patterns of a collecitve social identity, despite the anonymous environment. The ways in which resistance is understood differs, with r/antiwork engaging in more radical and explicit discourses, and r/TwoXchromosomes being more focused on traditional activism, legal and political reform. Discussions in both spaces have a high degree of semantic similarity. Based on these results, we argue that social identity salience plays a crucial role in shaping discussions in online resistance communities. This finding is particularly valuable in the field of digital participation, by offering a lens through which online civic and political engagement can be better understood both as a medium of discussing resistance practices, and as a practice of everyday resistance itself.