(Don’t) click here: Hyperlinks as a quasi-objectification strategy in epistemic legitimisation in extremists’ blog posts on sexual violence

Hyperlinks in blog posts play an important role in supporting and legitimising the claims made by bloggers, particularly on sites associated with polarisation, extremism and echo chambers. Links containing discursive elements and which are embedded as part of the text – known as anchor text – have, as yet, remained underexplored as a discourse strategy in epistemic positioning and studies on legitimisation. This paper draws on Hart’s (2011) work on subjectification and objectification categories of epistemic positioning to examine how anchor text hyperlinks in a corpus of blog posts, written by bloggers associated with the Alternative Right (Alt-Right) and Men’s Rights Activists, are used to substantiate claims related to sexual violence against women. The results of the study show a lack of transparency in the claims supported through anchor text, which I argue, can be considered a quasi-objectification category of epistemic legitimisation in the hypertexts in the dataset. The study employs a cognitive linguistic approach to examine evidentiality in the anchor text and contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the ways assertions are legitimised in polarising texts online.