Ruth Breeze

University of Navarra

• • Full Professor at the University of Navarra and the Principal Investigator of the Public Discourse research group in the Institute for Culture and Society.
  • Specialises in discourse analysis, professional communication, corpus linguistics and educational linguistics. 

Identity, community and polarisation in online forums

Discourse-based research on populism has often focused on ideological aspects of the representation of social groups, or addressed solo performances of populism by well-known political figures. We know much less about how ordinary people develop their thinking on politics, express their political allegiances and engage with members of other groups.

This paper looks at how ordinary people act out political positions by engaging with each other, using examples from reader comments pages on newspaper articles about right-wing politics. Antagonistic exchanges in online forums of this kind generally involve many different participants, who align with each other, building a sense of ad hoc ‘community’. They also compete with each other to denigrate or insult other groups, in a phenomenon that has been described as online ‘tribalism’.

My paper focuses on the discursive strategies used, often simultaneously, to affirm identity, build community within the in-group and delegitimise out-groups. After considering some theoretical approaches to identity and community, I investigate antagonism and alignment in a dataset of 2,600 comments from the reader comments section of Mail Online, in which people respond to an article published in 2025 about the immigration policy of the far-right Eurosceptic party Reform UK.