Media portrayals of Muslims cluster into threat frames, but social media remains understudied

Evidence

Four main themes regarding how Muslims are portrayed in these broadsheets include military threat, threat to democracy, and social threat to gender inequity, political violence and extremism, according to Richardson’s (2004) research of how Islam is portrayed in British broadsheets. Richardson’s (2004) work has received much research and citations; nevertheless, it was carried out before to the emergence of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, which together have 71 million daily users in the UK and 4 billion daily users globally. … Even though social media users are astounding, there are very few research examining social media conversation. Twitter claims to process approximately 500 million tweets daily worldwide, whereas Facebook claims that users submit 1.4 billion photographs, status updates, and comments daily worldwide. According to Nazmi (2018), the dearth of research is due to methodological challenges in managing and analyzing the massive amounts of unstructured data that are characteristic of social media platforms. — Muhammad Asad Latif, The Identity of Religion Always Comes Up, 27

Categorization

• QUESTION: If social media is where Muslim identity is now reproduced, the methodological gap means the most influential arena is the least evidenced.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in identity reproduced through media representation rather than lived practice. — connects to: Media imagery drives public bias against Muslims and Arabs — Sahar F. Aziz, Sticks and Stones, the Words That Hurt:…, 74