The affinity space framework has proven useful for explaining and understanding teacher activity on social media platforms. In this study, we explore the ‘dark side’ of teacher affinity spaces by documenting a partisan teachers’ group on an alternative social media platform. We used a mix of a priori and emergent coding to analyse screenshots of posts and comments from a public teachers’ group and group administrators’ activity on the broader platform. Findings indicate that although the group administrators began with a focus on teachers, most participants were non-teachers with political (rather than professional) concerns about US education. Furthermore, administrators both freely engaged with political talking points in their activity outside the teachers’ group and allowed the broader platform culture—including conspiratorial thinking, explicit racism and out-group villainization—to seep in. We conclude by describing how these findings correspond with the key characteristics of an affinity space, including an overlapping of affinities, a lack of concern for professional qualifications, and influence from the broader platform. These findings provide an illustrative example of how teacher affinity spaces can drift from their stated intention within the larger platform context.

This article presents a critical discourse analysis of groups on the free speech social media platform Gab that were intended to be LGBTQ+-friendly but became spaces of queerphobia. Results indicate that Gab users deployed discourses of difference to situate the platform as heteronormative and to denigrate the LGBTQ+ community. In particular, discourses utilized in the name of free speech were used to establish LGBTQ+ individuals as abominations, undergird hegemonic masculinity, and marginalize queer folk by reducing them to sex acts and sex organs. This study provides a better understanding of the (in)efficacy of “free speech” as a content moderation policy and unpacks how anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech spreads in digital spaces.

In the United States, LGBTQ+ individuals are often imagined as inherently politically progressive, but this assumption overlooks the experiences of self-identified LGBTQ+ conservatives. Likewise, although social media platforms are recognized as spaces of identity and community production for LGBTQ+ people generally, less work has considered how they provide a similar forum for “gayservatives.” In response, this article engages in a critical discourse analysis of LGBTQ+-oriented groups on the far right social media platform Gab. Results indicate that far right social media is utilized to connect with other politically similar LGBTQ+ individuals perceived to be absent in one’s offline community. Participants do so via discourses that both regulate and celebrate LGBTQ+ identities, particularly as it relates to hegemonic masculinity. These strategies generally reinforce, but at times reframe, stereotypical narratives about LGBTQ+ individuals. This study provides groundwork for more nuanced understandings of both LGBTQ+ conservatives and the ways power is socialized and embodied through discourses about sexual and gender identities.

‘Alternative’ social media platforms like Parler and Gab—on which hate speech and conspiracy theories often exist unchecked—present an opportunity for instructional designers and other education professionals to revisit assumptions about informal learning on social media. Employing a conceptual framework that distinguishes education from miseducation, we use these controversial platforms to argue that educators should more fully consider: 1) the miseducation happening in learning spaces, 2) how the design of educational technologies may amplify miseducation, and 3) the importance that formal education resist miseducation.