Contesting Lineage: #ADOS and the Online Reparations Discourse

This dissertation examines the online influence campaign #ADOS and its messaging in the online black public sphere to influence reparations and other policies targeting African Americans. Research was conducted using a set of 36 hourlong YouTube videos by the influence campaign’s leaders alongside SuperChat data in order to discern how the group constructed a discourse that attempted to separate individuals descended from enslaved persons in the United States from their diasporic counterparts. The project also considers the use of networked harassment to counter attempts to study this deployment of lineage. Results found that ADOS advanced a lineage discourse that used nativist appeals to persuade black Americans of their distinction from members of the African diaspora that and this discourse has been successful in influencing proposed reparations policies.