Birth of a scapegoat: An actor‐affect‐affordance model of symbolic attribution in the digital age

How do scapegoating narratives emerge, diffuse, and solidify within digital media ecosystems? This paper introduces an actor‐affect‐affordance (3A) model to explain how complex social problems become symbolically attributed to marginalized groups. This framework is applied to the rise of the “trans terrorism” narrative that followed the 2023 Nashville school shooting, which framed mass shootings as the product of an alleged “gender ideology epidemic,” focusing on discourse within a right‐wing alternative social media platform where this narrative in part crystallized. Findings offer new insight into the construction of exclusionary identities in the digital age, opening several avenues for future scholarship at the intersection of political psychology, digital communication, and cultural sociology.