Tweeting the flag: User-generated nationalism at a pro-Trump protest and counterprotest

This research examines how protesters supporting Donald Trump and counterprotesters opposed to his re-election as US president interpreted and reinterpreted “flags” as political symbols. The empirical analysis involves the computational modeling of two corpora of Twitter posts using the hashtags of protesters and counterprotesters, respectively. The study illustrates how user-generated nationalism serves as a means of racialization and partisan discrimination. Both protesters and counterprotesters used American nationalism to justify their claims—but even more so to attack and delegitimize their detractors. However, the meanings they accorded to American nationalism were quite different. Protesters had an exclusivist view of American nationalism as standing for White supremacy, and Whiteness itself was constructed as the subjugation and criminalization of Blacks, immigrants, and anti-Trump activists. Counterprotesters seemingly adopted an “anti-fascist” perspective but they, too, engaged in the politics of exclusion and reified American Exceptionalism.