The Rainbow Conspiracy: A Corpus-Based Social Media Analysis of Anti-LGBTIQ+ Rhetoric in Digital Landscapes

This chapter explores online anti-LGBTIQ+ discourses and the resulting claim that sexual diversity runs counter to most mainstream, traditional, or religious values. Such narratives feed into the theory underlying an alleged disinformation crusade enacted across most social networking sites (see Balirano & Hughes 2020), whereby a secret, large-scale gay lobby, akin to the proverbial Trojan horse, is progressively infiltrating traditional family values with an aim to defile the entire human race. By investigating a corpus of online conspiracy-evoking texts collected from Twitter, this study offers a corpus-based social-media critical discourse approach to online fake news that serves to cast a conspiratorial shadow upon LGBTIQ+ communities. We posit that such dangerous anti-LGBTIQ+ discourses originating from manipulated news feeds and subsequently woven together across social networking sites may progressively lead to the construction of an LGBTIQ+ conspiracy theory wreaking damage upon a sorely tried minority.