Performing Identity: Repetition, Emoji, and Candidate Indicators of Amplified Visibility in Jordanian–Palestinian Facebook Discourse
2026-06-15
This study examines how Arabic Facebook comments shape political tensions between Jordanians and Palestinians. The corpus contains 800 public comments collected from public Facebook pages focused on Jordanian–Palestinian affairs between January and July 2025. Methods combine immersive digital ethnography with systematic netnographic coding and a reproducible coordination–detection protocol applied at three scales: micro (linguistic strategies), meso (semiotic affordances), and macro (temporal and network patterns). The results show that dialectal markers, religious formulae, emojis, short slogans, and threaded replies interact to produce strong identity signaling and affective circulation. A subset of items displays heuristic markers associated with amplified visibility, such as exact-text repetition, clustered timestamps, repeated links, and low-engagement account profiles. These markers are presented as candidate indicators of amplification, not as proof of centralized orchestration. This study provides open detection scripts and appendix materials for human adjudication and follow-up network analyses. Findings point to low-cost interventions, such as prompts before verbatim reposting and triage workflows for flagged clusters, and to the need for cross-platform tracing and bot analyses to confirm provenance.