Muslim immigration to the US: Ethnographic analysis of Facebook pages

Using ethnographic discourse analysis as a linguistic anthropologist, I argue that Facebook conversations provide a forum for informal deliberation. My research studies comments and replies to a post calling for an end to Muslim immigration to the US--a “highly divisive political issue.” As part of a larger project, I examine how participants address their comments, whether as “personal” responses to the main post, as responses to each other, or as broadcasts to all readers. Thus, although all participants act within a type of public sphere, they do so in different ways, some more expressly and self-consciously than others. This can be elucidated from the linguistic features of the conversations, their “interactional context” on the Facebook page, and their ethnographic and sociopolitical context in twenty-first century USA (Roth-Gordon 2020). While the particular deliberative communication I study occurs well before the Covid-19 crisis, in 2015, current discussions on the same Facebook page are strikingly similar. This deliberation may not yield clear conclusions, but neither does “deliberation” in the US Congress, where speeches on the floor appear to be aimed at supporters rather than at opponents in the chamber; conversations leading to actual compromise take place in less public fora. That being said, Facebook pages of public figures do influence policy. The particular post I am studying preceded Donald Trump’s call for an end to Muslim immigration by some five months. That does not prove causation, but the earlier post surely convinced many followers of the page to support Trump actively. As for decisions, even the bourgeois public sphere did not set policy directly but rather influenced policy-makers (Habermas 1989, ch. 3). While today’s influence may be more diffuse due to the “structural transformations” to which Habermas draws attention, Facebook conversations can significantly influence public policy, and are an active locus of deliberation.