Discussions of social media have become all the more urgent in recent years, partly because of its general impact on mainstream culture, partly because of its implications for multicultural understanding, and partly because of their role in promoting extremism in various domains. Scholarship regarding social media discourse and its role in radicalization has been mostly confined to domains that are traditionally considered political, while other scholarship has noted the use of signs in popular culture being appropriated in extremist discourses online. However, little research has been presented on elements of extremism in domains traditionally thought of as non-political, overlooking potential root causes for political extremism and popular preferences for authoritarianism. A new study is thus required to apply a critical lens to discourses whose objects of interest may be popularly considered as innocuous but which may have consequential influences in the broader world.

To address this need, this presentation reports on a discourse analysis of social media activity relating to American soccer fandom. The researcher developed an analytical framework synthesizing various theories regarding extremist, authoritarian, and otherwise radical discourses to examine publicly available text, images, and multimedia on various social media platforms that engaged the fandom relevant to the United States national teams and Major League Soccer. An analysis of the collected data illustrates noticeable patterns in American soccer discourse that are similar to those found in online political discourses, raising the characterization of American soccer fandom and other fandoms as "gateway" fandoms to more political discourses. A discussion of this analysis is aimed at affirming the linguistic reach of social media as a political tool not merely in its obvious functions but also in its potential to condition social media users toward political and overall extremism in both the online and offline worlds.