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Dylan Clairmont '21

Intertextuality Beyond the Hashtag: How Members of Rose Twitter Respond to Breaking News

In this thesis, I examine the communal linguistic strategies that members of Rose Twitter, a loosely organized community of socialists and leftists, employ when reacting to breaking news events. I use the framework of intertextuality to analyze the webs of connection among tweets within this community, and demonstrate how all tweets build upon past tweets and other textual data to facilitate community building. I specifically analyze conventions of naming, ideological phrase attachment, and joking. This thesis ultimately attempts to push back on claims that Twitter fosters the creation of echo chambers by demonstrating the active process of democratically building upon past tweets to form current knowledge and language.