Abstract
Muslim women face unique obstacles in American electoral and political arenas. The politicization of Muslim women has regained momentum after the 2016 election. Our study examines attributes of Rep. Ilhan Omar in legacy and social media. Muslim women are portrayed as submissive, oppressed and exotic in Western media. Ilhan Omar has challenged this narrative by becoming the first veiled, Muslim women in the the U.S. House of Representatives.
We focus on Twitter because it is the platform that President Trump uses to communicate with his conservative base. Also, the Wall Street Journal’s (WSJ) editorial stance tends to be conservative as well. The current study examines the interaction between the conservative newspaper and Twitter hashtags that both support and oppose Omar. President Trump has targeted Omar’ national origin, religion and immigration status. For this examination, three hashtags were gathered from Twitter including #IlhanOmar, #GoBack and #WelcomeHome. The tone of all three hashtags differ (neutral, negative and positive) and we expect congruence in the results of the content analysis.
Across the time frame of May 1, 2019 to February 2, 2020 tweets including the phrases “Ilhan” “Omar” and “Go Back” and tweets including the phrases “Ilhan” “Omar” and “Welcome Home” were collected. This resulted in 8,769 tweets for the “Go Back” phrase and 5,122 tweets for the phrase “Welcome Home.” Articles from the WSJ that contained “Ilhan Omar” were obtained for the same time period which resulted in 78 articles. To narrow down the tweets, they were then compared to a list of words widely associated with Ilhan Omar which resulted in the terms “Hate”, “Muslim”, “Terrorist” and “Women” having high frequency. The tweets and WSJ articles then were aggregated and counted at the month level to examine frequency and prevalence of the four aforementioned high frequency words. The tweets and WSJ articles were then content analyzed in terms of source, tone and sentiment. This work presents the interesting dynamic between a conservative news outlet and the social media platform by considering the tone and occurrences of high frequency words. The content analysis of each of the platforms considers the congruences and biases across platforms. The results shed light on media representations of Muslim women as a whole and Ilhan Omar specifically.
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