Speaking Security on Social Media Networks

The way we speak about certain issues can have an effect on whether they are treated as security threats. It is a shift from perceiving security as a given, to seeing it as a linguistic construct (Aradau, C., Huysmans, J., Neal, A., & Voelkner, N. (2014). Critical security methods: New frameworks for analysis. Routledge; Austin, J. L. (1975). How to do things with words (Vol. 88). Oxford University Press; Stritzel, Security in translation: securitization theory and the localization of threat, Springer, 2014; Wæver, Lipschutz (ed), On Security, Columbia University Press, 1995). While it is true that the concept of securitization has become a dominant approach to security, the framework has not yet fully considered the impact of communication technologies on security discourse. In particular, the claim that “security is articulated only from a specific place, in an institutional voice, by elites” (Wæver, Lipschutz (ed), On Security, Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 57) has imposed a top-down conceptualization that fails to reflect the important shift in the communication paradigm brought about by social media platforms, leaving many open questions regarding the ways in which online networks contribute to the emergence of security problems. To address this gap, this chapter bridges the fields of International Security, Political Communication, and Computational Social Science to analyze the mechanisms that bolster the emergence of security threats on online networks. Overall, the discussion that follows analyzes securitization from a discourse network perspective, concluding that our individual online behavior can have system-wide implications on the international security sphere, and indicating that more critical attention should be given to the content that we choose to share on social media.