The Rainbow Conspiracy: a corpus-based social media analysis of anti-LGBTIQ+ rhetoric in digital landscapes.

In recent years, fake news and other online strategies designed to generate misinformation across Social Networking Sites (SNSs) have become rife, and when it comes to targeting sexual diversity and gender equality, they are progressively garnering global social reverberation (Justice/Hooker 2017; Forgas/Baumeister 2019; Stabile et al. 2019; Bernecker et al. 2021). Regardless of the obvious, patently inflated, conspiracist rhetoric underlying such hateful discourses (see Balirano/Borba 2021), these anti-gender and anti-equality speculations tend to converge upon the slippery trope of gender ideology (Andrews et al. 2015; Beltrán/Creely 2018; Pascale 2019; Černohorská 2020; Wasser/França 2020). Indeed, it is by wielding the discursive tools pertaining to this ideology that a global movement currently opposes gender equality, abortion, sexual education, and LGBTIQ+ rights in areas such as marriage, adoption, surrogacy, and reproductive technologies (Butler 2019), thus contributing to the stigmatization of LGBTIQ+ activism (Borba 2019a, 2019b). The findings of this study reveal that one of the most damaging implications of this phenomenon is that anti-gender mobilizations are increasingly taking root and thriving within the collective memory by means of semiotic processes of loose affiliation. Against this backdrop, the present chapter explores the current discourses of anti-gay activism and their claim that sexual diversity runs counter to most mainstream, traditional or religious values. Such allegations, in turn, feed into the theory underlying the misinformation crusade enacted across most SNSs (see Balirano/Hughes 2020), whereby a secret, large-scale gay lobby, akin to the proverbial Trojan Horse, is progressively penetrating traditional family values in order to defile the entire human race through ad hoc gender recruitment. By analyzing a collection of anti-gender online texts collected from Twitter – by using seed words and phrases such as ‘LGBTIQ+ conspiracy’, ‘Homintern’, ‘Gaystapo’ and ‘Lavender mafia’ – this study offers a corpus-based sociolinguistic CDA analysis of the current state of the art of fake news addressing LGBTIQ+ online communities. References Andrews, Molly / Kinnvall, Catarina / Monroe, Kristen 2015. Narratives of (In)Security: Nationhood, Culture, Religion, and Gender: Introduction to the Special Issue. Political Psychology 36 (2): 141–149. Balirano, Giuseppe / Hughes, Bronwen (eds) 2020. 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