Populist dialogues on Twitter to #PutAustraliaFirst

Over the past decades, populist propaganda has grown exponentially, triggering the proliferation of nationalistic discourses worldwide. Australia has not been exempt from the populist surge, which has propagated online and offline, yet without receiving enough academic attention. Considering the disintermediated interaction promoted by their communicative formats, Social Networking Sites (SNSs) are believed to have fostered the spread of populist ideologies. While recent research conceptualizes SNSs as socio-discursive sites where ambient affiliations come to be dialogically construed by means of conversational tagging, it has not been investigated whether and how hashtagging enables political dialogue among populist affiliates in virtual contexts. Aiming to fill this gap, the present research relies on a corpus-based mixed methodology that combines the semantic mapping of hashtags, through the quantitative methodologies of Social Network Analysis, with the qualitative approaches of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The article investigates a corpus of tweets posted by selected populist politicians active in Australia. Drawing upon Halliday's metafunctions of language, tweets were closely analyzed to gain insights into the semantic nature and linguistic functions of the collected hashtags. By borrowing Bakhtin's and Austin's terminological framework, the paper ultimately discusses how the Twitter ambient is dialogically built.