ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how social media tribalizes politics by creating a shared collective identity. Drawing on Randall Collins and the Durkheimian tradition, we examine online interactions on Stormfront as a form of repeated rituals in which words become markers of community belonging and barriers to outsiders. We examine how the language of new members is transformed over time as they engage with the Stormfront community, tracing the gradual lexical changes that signal their socialization into the community. We find that participants, over time, cease viewing themselves as individuals and begin understanding themselves as part of a larger community – absorbing its in-out-group distinctions as part of their own self-presentation and taking up the community ideology and discourse as the language in which they tell the story of their own identity. The shifting language captures how members of Stormfront develop new stories about themselves and their role in the social world. These changes are central to their identity and the foundations of their emotional lives.
