Abstract:
The article concerns the impact framing by devil terms in social media has on
democratic deliberation. Daniel Kahneman and Richard Weaver have shown how terms with
powerful emotional connections, what Weaver calls god-terms and devil-terms, give the
readers/audience cues as to how to react to any given situation. We have applied this theoretical
framework to discourses in communities supportive of Donald Trump’s election fraud narrative.
Our results show how powerful framing terms were used in order to convince supporters that they
faced existential threat from a de-facto coup perpetrated by a powerful and evil elite. We also
discuss how such strategies may be countered in order to preserve democracies.
