Understanding the Prevalence of Caste: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Community Profiles on X

2024-07-03

AI Summary

This study examines how upper-caste users on X (formerly Twitter) systematically exploit platform affordances—such as visibility, searchability, and shareability—to construct and reinforce caste-supremacist discourse, framing themselves as “moral victims” and thereby exacerbating digital marginalization of lower-caste communities. Employing Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) for the first time in HCI research, the study integrates platform feature mapping with qualitative coding to identify two core discursive strategies and empirically demonstrates how platform architecture is instrumentalized to reproduce caste hierarchy. The work advances theoretical understanding of how structural inequality is translated and amplified online, while also proposing actionable design interventions—grounded in anti-caste praxis—for fostering inclusive, equitable platform architectures. It thus bridges critical methodological and practical gaps in digital inequality research concerning caste, offering both conceptual innovation and design-oriented implications.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Humans and AI: Explainable AI (XAI) for Human Understanding
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Preferences

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economics and fairness of platforms and recommendation systems
• Responsible Web: Algorithmic accountability and transparency on the web
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Bridging structured and unstructured data

Abstract

Despite decades of anti-caste efforts, sociocultural practices that marginalize lower-caste groups in India remain prevalent and have even proliferated with the use of social media. This paper examines how groups engaged in caste-based discrimination leverage platform affordances of the social media site X (formerly Twitter) to circulate and reinforce caste ideologies. Using a critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach, we examine the rhetorical and organizing strategies of 50 X profiles representing upper-caste collectives. We find that these profiles leverage platform affordances such as information control, bandwidth, visibility, searchability, and shareability to construct two main arguments: (1) that their upper caste culture deserves a superior status and (2) that they are the"true"victims of oppression in society. These profiles' digitally mediated discursive strategies contribute to the marginalization of lower castes by normalizing caste cultures, strengthening caste networks, reinforcing caste discrimination, and diminishing anti-caste measures. Our analysis builds upon previous HCI conceptualizations of online harms and safety to inform how to address caste-based marginalization. We offer theoretical and methodological suggestions for critical HCI research focused on studying the mechanisms of power along other social categories.

Problem

• Caste System
• Social Inequality
• Social Media

Innovation

• Simple Language Analysis
• Caste-Based Online Harm
• Social Media Characterization