E-Policing the Crisis: Social Media, Moral Panics and Hegemony in the UK

My research aims to analyse how state actors and key media allies, in the UK, articulate narratives of various crises on social media in order to demobilise social opposition and legitimate coercive governance. This builds upon the work of Stuart Hall's 'Policing the Crisis' through his concept of moral panic whereby the state invokes "apparently non-political issues such as race, law-and-order, permissiveness and social anarchy" to build consent for increasingly coercive governance in times of crisis, updated to the digital age of social media.

I do this by mapping networks of hegemonic actors and digital infrastructure and how they shape dominant framings of the cost-of-living and refugee crises; identifying which framings of crises are hegemonic on social media, and the implications these discourses have on counter-hegemonic groups and their participation as part of healthy thriving communities. Ultimately, I aim to assist the latter in contesting dominant, exclusionary narratives of crisis in favour of positive, counter-hegemonic discourses.

Methodologically, this research involves an innovative mixed-methods approach incorporating digital topic modelling, critical discourse and content analysis, and audience diaries and interviews. The design is a within-case comparison of the crises and simultaneously analyses two aspects. The first involves scraping data from state and media actors' social media posts regarding key events in the cost-of-living and refugee crises, for both quantitative topic modelling and content analysis.

In the second aspect, media diaries and semi-structured interviews are used to analyse how dominant articulations of crisis are negotiated by (counter-)hegemonic actors on social media.