Building the Wall: Social Media and the Materialization of Collective Identity

Long before Donald Trump becoming the master of Twitter it was with the Tea Party Movement (TPM) that many on the right side of the United States’ political aisle began reinventing their political engagement and organization in the image of social media. The seeds of the Tea Party fervor were sown, in the late 2008, amidst the turmoil of a financial crisis in full swing, an outgoing Republican president admitting having “abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system” and an African-American Democrat president-elect heading to the Oval Office. At such a pivotal juncture in the US politics, dispersed groups of disgruntled conservatives, arguably fed up with their usual resort, the Grand Old Party (G.O.P.), started to voice their anger—this time though by taking note of Obama’s harnessing of social media in organizing and mobilizing. This paper reports on a genealogy of the emergence and evolution of Top Conservatives On Twitter (TCOT)—an amateur ranking of conservative Twitter users, which evolved into a collaborative-competitive community, and then in 2009 an organizer of the TPM. The aim is to investigate the materialization of collective identity—i.e. the ongoing differentiation of “who we are” from “who we are not”—in organizing through social media.