Previous studies of online (collective) identity have explored how social media–specific practices like hashtags can enable identity construction and affiliation with a wider community of users. Practices such as mentioning and retweeting have also been discussed in the literature but the practice of following as a discourse practice is underexplored. This article presents a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analytical approach to the study of collective identity on Twitter that focuses on the relationships between following and language use and details a study conducted on the language used by followers of the Football Lads Alliance – a protest group who say they are ‘against all extremism’. This approach was fruitful in identifying correlations between salient discourses in follower profile descriptions and their tweets and suggests that a portion of the followership constructs identity in relation to radical right-wing and populist discourse specifically concerning Islam/Muslims.

中文翻译：

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推特上足球小伙子联盟追随者中的集体认同和话语实践

先前对在线（集体）身份的研究探索了社交媒体特定的实践（如主题标签）如何能够实现身份构建并与更广泛的用户社区建立联系。文献中也讨论了提及和转发等实践，但作为一种话语实践的关注实践尚未得到充分探索。本文介绍了一种基于语料库的批判性话语分析方法来研究 Twitter 上的集体身份，该方法侧重于关注和语言使用之间的关系，并详细介绍了一项针对足球小伙子联盟（一个抗议团体）的追随者使用的语言进行的研究。说他们“反对一切极端主义”。