far-right Mormonism and the boundaries of Twitter hashtags

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There are a couple of weeks before the deadline to submit abstracts for the Mormon Social Science Association’s sessions at the 2024 meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, so I’ve been filling some nooks and crannies of my busy work week by looking at some Twitter data. Last year, I published with my colleague Amy Chapman a qualitative look at the #DezNat Twitter hashtag, which blends Mormon orthodoxy with far-right and anti-feminist thinking.

We are already working on a second paper based on that same analysis, but it occurred to me in getting ready for SSSR 2024 that I had nearly four years of tweets including the #DezNat hashtag. It’s obviously an incomplete history—besides the fact that this movement extends beyond Twitter, I don’t have data from before I started collecting it, and the Musk-era academic API shutdown put a hard stop on my data collection—but four years isn’t nothing, and it would be interesting to see how things look from a 10,000-foot view.

Indeed, even a quick look at activity over time is interesting. The plot above looks at tweets per month over the whole timeframe of my data, and there are a couple of quick takeaways that I think you can get from it alone:

First, there has been a decline of #DezNat activity on Twitter since 2021. This isn’t surprising: 2021 began with some coverage of #DezNat by Peggy Fletcher Stack at the Salt Lake Tribune that could have increased scrutiny on the movement, and June and July saw some doxxing of the person who coined the hashtag as well as one of its most vocal supporters. This led the former to close his Twitter account, and while the second is still around, his activity on the hashtag definitely went down. I’m sure #DezNat lives on in other ways, but there’s certainly a “rise and fall” effect between 2019 and 2022.

The second thing that stands out from that first plot—and is even more clear from this second “tweets per day” one—is that peaks of #DezNat activity are associated with specific chronological events. I’ve looked at the ten most active days for the #DezNat hashtag over this time, and they’re all associated with major events of some kind. Of those top 10 days, spots 2-9 are associated with General Conferences of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Previous research has demonstrated that this is a peak time of Mormon activity on Twitter already, and Amy and I know from our qualitative data analysis that #DezNat-affiliated accounts would use that hashtag in conjunction with official hashtags for the Conferences as a way of both joining the conversation and putting their names out there.

Spot number 10 is in early March of 2020, when the Latter-day Saint Church Educational System clarified that its policies disallowed same-sex dating on campus. BYU had previously interpreted recent changes to CES policy as allowing for same-sex dating (because the policies didn’t explicitly say anything about it), and so the CES clarification led to an abrupt about-face at BYU. Conservative people on Mormon Twitter had been upset about BYU’s policy (in contrast, more progressive users and queer BYU students were ecstatic about it), and the about-face led to a certain amount of triumphal gloating using the #DezNat hashtag—enough to register in the top 10 days in this (limited) history of the hashtag.

Spot number 1 is maybe the most interesting, though. In June 2020, a white Black Lives Matter protestor shot and injured a driver trying to get his pickup truck through a group of protestors in Provo (video here). This—unsurprisingly—became a culture war flashpoint, and one user included the #DezNat hashtag in some of his tweets criticizing the shooting. On a single day in June, one of his tweets got 4,300 retweets and a second got 2,600, making this day the day that the #DezNat Twitter hashtag got the most use.

This—finally—brings me to the title of my post. From the very beginning, one of the biggest debates about #DezNat has been what the movement has been about. Is it a movement for defending religious orthodoxy made up of practicing, faithful Latter-day Saints? Or is it a far-right movement made up of would be alt-right types? One of the things that Amy and I tried to demonstrate in our paper is that neither of those can be conclusively proven. There are definitely patterns of far-right behavior in the data that we studied, but there are also plenty of tweets that are mundanely Mormon. It would be a mistake to dismiss the political rhetoric that is present in the tweets, but it’s difficult to say whether the #DezNat Twitter hashtag is ontologically a far-right phenomenon (in fact, it’s arguably more dangerous for that fact!).

We also commented on the fact that hashtags are social spaces with essentially no boundaries at all. If you want to use the hashtag, you use it, and there are really interesting findings (in my research and others’ work) of the unexpected consequences of that sort of thing. To use a hashtag as the defining characteristic of a phenomenon is inherently and methodologically to ask questions about what it means for there to be boundaries in an online social space. In the case of #DezNat, where the boundaries and identity of the movement are contested from the get-go, I see this fuzziness as a feature rather than a bug—the fuzziness of hashtag boundaries gets us asking important questions about the fuzziness of the #DezNat movement, which gets us asking questions about the far right and Mormon boundary maintenance.

With all of this in mind, I think it’s fascinating that each of the 10 most active days in the history of the #DezNat Twitter hashtag indicate those boundaries by connecting with issues and events that go beyond this little Twitter movement. Eight of them connect with mainstream Mormonism (though a content analysis would surely suggest some right-wing thinking), one of them brings together institutional Mormonism and right-wing priorities, but spot number one goes to an overlap between right-wing racial panic and this outspoken group on Mormon Twitter. Even if—as Amy and I argued—hashtag ontology is not a productive pursuit, there’s no denying that the #DezNat hashtag made the biggest impact in its history when some of its tweets got picked up by Black Lives Matter critics. That means something, and I’m looking forward to writing some of that something up for SSSR 2024.

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