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Online Hate: From the Far-Right to the ‘Alt-Right’ and from the Margins to the Mainstream
Abstract
In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was much discussion about the democratic and anti-democratic implications of the Internet. The latter particularly focused on the ways in which the far-right were using the Internet to spread hate and recruit members. Despite this common assumption, the American far-right did not harness the Internet quickly, effectively or widely. More recently, however, they have experienced a resurgence and mainstreaming, benefitting greatly from social media. This chapter examines the history of their use of the Internet with respect to: (1) how this developed in response to political changes and emerging technologies; (2) how it reflected and changed the status of such movements and their brand of hate; and (3) the relationship between online activity and traditional methods of communication.
... Meanwhile, other authors, such as Ahmed (2004a) and Sauer (2019), consider that the terms 'affect' and 'emotion' can be used indifferently because of the difficulty of determining the beginning and end of each. Following this last approach, we consider affects as emotions that are located between and through the corporeal, the individual and the social (Wetherell 2012;Ahmed 2004b). They are neither solely embodied nor floating the social; they are bodily embodied intensities and sensations negotiated in the social (Ahmed 2004b;Anderson 2016). ...
... Drawing also from Enguix's (2020) 'overflown' conception of bodies (as material-discursive gendered, affective, and political elements) and a feminist material-discursive approach (Wetherell 2012), we understand affects as all those discursive, material, and sensorial bits and pieces that affect us and are affected by us. They are material, social, physiological, and semiotic entities that not only configure us and our close relationships, but also make the political and affective atmospheres palpable (Berlant 2011, p. 16). ...
... To understand how love and other related affects are assembled with gender discourses within the far right, we have used an affective-discursive approach (Wetherell 2012). This methodology, based on discursive content analysis and Affective Frame Analysis (AFA, Sauer 2019) allows us to perform a feminist and critical analysis. ...
In this article, we aim to explore how affects work within and through gender discourse in the Spanish far right. We address two burning topics: the connection of (anti)gender and far-right politics and the political potential of affects. Opposing traditional views, we argue that far-right groups are not exclusively driven by hate. In Vox leaders’ speeches, love appears as a political affective narrative with political effects. Love brings the ‘us’ together while creating an affective and political border between the ‘objects of love’ (nation, family, equality and men) and the ‘objects of hate’ (feminism, immigration, gender and sexual pluralism).
Free access to the article: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/HINBHFIZCBSEWTHMRCHN/full?target=10.1080/13608746.2022.2115185
... Notably, the internet has proven important for the dissemination of farright discourse into mainstream public debate (Ekman, 2015;Karl, 2019;Schwarzenegger & Wagner, 2018;A. Winter, 2019) but more than that, the internet is often used actively and skilfully by the far right to help increase their legitimacy and appeal to less radical audiences (Daniels, 2009;Gerstenfeld et al., 2003;A. Klein, 2012). It might be tempting to dismiss the relevance of digital far-right settings, networks, discourses, and users as marginal an ...
... Among the most important efforts by the far right online as well as offline are those which help normalise or 'mainstream' far-right ideology (e.g., Feischmidt & Hervik, 2015;Karl, 2019;Mondon & Winter, 2020;A. Winter, 2019). These more or less active efforts include deploying discourse otherwise commonly associated with mainstream politics (Cammaerts, 2018;Feischmidt & Hervik, 2015), for instance attempting to leverage progressive politics' protection of freedom of speech to justify and disseminate far-right discourse (Castelli Gattinara, 2017;Gerstenfeld ...
... and trolling as strategies to spread their political agenda, the alt-right appears from the outside as a youthful, carefree, mischievous, and in some sense 'fun' movement, not to be taken too seriously. Consequently, they might sometimes be thought to not pose any real danger to mainstream society (Hartzell, 2018;Hawley, 2017;Tuters & Hagen, 2020;A. Winter, 2019). ...
Background: This thesis explores the far right online beyond the study of political parties and extremist far-right sites and content. Specifically, it focuses on the proliferation of far-right discourse among ‘ordinary’ internet users in mainstream digital settings. In doing so, it aims to bring the study of far-right discourse and the enabling roles of digital platforms and influential users into dialogue. It does so by analysing what is communicated and how; where it is communicated and therein the roles of different socio-technical features associated with various online settings; and finally, by whom, focusing on particularly influential users.
Methods: The thesis uses material from four different datasets of digital, user-generated content, collected at different times through different methods. These datasets have been analysed using mixed methods approaches wherein interpretative methods, primarily in the form of critical discourse analysis (CDA), have been combined with various data processing techniques, descriptive statistics, visualisations, and computational data analysis methods.
Results: The thesis provides a number of findings in relation to far-right discourse, digital platforms, and online influence, respectively. In doing so it builds on the findings of previous research, illustrates unexpected and contradictory results in relation to what was previously known, and makes a number of interesting new discoveries. Overall, it begins to unravel the complex interconnectedness of far-right discourse, platforms, and influential users, and illustrates that to understand the far-right’s efforts online it is imperative to take several dimensions into account simultaneously.
Conclusion: The thesis makes several contributions. First, the thesis makes a conceptual contribution by focusing on the interconnectedness of far-right efforts online. Second, it makes an empirical contribution by exploring the multifaceted grassroots or ‘non-party’ dimensions of far-right mobilisation, Finally, the thesis makes a methodological contribution through its mix of methods which illustrates how different aspects of the far right, over varying time periods, diversely sized and shaped datasets, and user constellations, can be approached to reveal broader overarching patterns as well as intricate details.
... A prime example of such online spaces is the Politically Incorrect board /pol/, a subforum of the notorious website 4chan. Despite studies on /pol/'s common racist, anti-semitic and homophobic content (Colley and Moore 2022; Zannettou et al. 2020), as well as its far-right, alt-right, and white supremacy tendencies (Woods and Hahner 2019;Winter 2019;Stern, 2019), less is known about the organisational practices that make up various political activities on /pol/ (Hine et al. 2017; but see Tuters 2021). Therefore, in this article we focus on the development of political actions that originated on /pol/. ...
... For example, Bouvier and Cheng (2019) pointed out that despite the usefulness of social networking sites, they do not reflect the whole public; they lack rational argumentation; have the potential for radicalising protests and increasing polarisation; they can be used by the state in authoritarian regimes for control of dissent; as well as by the far-right and other extreme and non-democratic groups (see also Bouvier and Rosenbaum, 2020). Through use of the internet, far-right activists have been influencing culture by spreading radical ideas and ideology through online media content to reach the broader public from their fringe communities (Kearney 2019;Winter 2019;Armstrong 2021). Far-right content is usually masked within humorous memes that are "ironically" shared online, or used for trolling (Woods and Hahner 2019), which elicits online responses (from liberals and/or mainstream media) (Donovan et al. 2022). ...
This article aims to understand the organisational practices of digital political actions on 4chan’s /pol/ (Politically Incorrect) board, as well as the underlying worldview within which those actions were nested. By using a qualitative thematic analysis of 21 threads, several themes were identified regarding preferred goals, methods, content, dissemination strategies, and worldview of intentional, orchestrated political actions with supposed real-world effects. Results show that the observed political actions were bottom-up, non-hierarchical, and collective actions, through which collective identity was established despite the almost complete anonymity of the /pol/ board. Additionally, the political actions were marked by the negative perception of Western liberal democracy, extremely negative attitudes toward the Left, minorities, and progressive liberals, antisemitism, and racism - values closely related to the far-right. Although the goals of /pol/ political actions differ, the dominant broader goal is to “redpill the normies” - indoctrinate the general population into denouncing liberal democratic ideology and accepting the far-right worldview.
... Online environments also enable radical or extremist actors to easily access individuals who were previously difficult to approach (e.g., by allowing these actors to cloak their radical or extremist backgrounds due to the greater degree of anonymity online compared to offline settings). Most notably, the extensive multiplier effect potentially achieved through online content, especially through social media, and access to previously (offline) hard-to-reach groups increase the potential of online mainstreaming (Winter, 2019). ...
... This was due to our assumption that the internet is an essential environment in which extremists strategically aim to mainstream their ideology. The internet has not only proven to be a vital area for extremist propaganda and mobilization among sympathizers (e.g., Conway et al., 2019), but also well suited to approaching the broader public to push extremists' ideas towards the mainstream (Winter, 2019). However, offline communication could also be relevant to mainstreaming processes. ...
Over the past decade, extremists have increasingly aimed to integrate their ideologies into the center of society by changing the presentation of their narratives to appeal to a larger audience. This process is termed (strategic) mainstreaming. Although this phenomenon is not new, the factors that contribute to the mainstreaming of radical and extremist ideas have not been systematically summarized. To identify elements fostering mainstreaming dynamics, we conducted a systematic literature review of N = 143 studies. The results demonstrate that mainstreaming’s gradual and long-term nature makes it particularly difficult to operationalize, which is why it often remains a buzzword. In this article, we propose a novel conceptualization of mainstreaming, understanding it as two communicative steps (content positioning and susceptibility), and present 12 contributing factors. These factors can serve as starting points for future studies, helping to operationalize mainstreaming, empirically monitor it, and, subsequently, tackle its (long-term) effects.
... Arora and Lata (2020) state consumers rely on UGC when selecting destinations. Social media influences users' online opinions and assists them in evaluating incoming information (Winter, 2019). However, research on how social media impacts users' intentions before visiting a destination is still in its early stages. ...
... including YouTube channels (Arora and Lata, 2020), social media (Dedeoğlu, 2019;Dedeoğlu et al., 2020), purchasing intentions (Liu et al., 2019;Xu and Yao, 2015), social networking sites (Winter, 2019), online reviews (Shin et al., 2018) and employee system for information system usage (Li, 2015). Hence we hypothesise: ...
... George Hawley (2021; Thompson & Hawley, 2021) contends that following the disastrous 2017 "Unite the Right Rally" in Charlottesville the alt-right has dissolved back to margins and lost much of its appeal and influence. Yet, others argue that the alt-right has shifted from the fringes to the mainstream, normalizing their extreme right-wing viewpoints (see Blazak, 2022;Campbell, 2022;Reid et al., 2020;Sunderland, 2022;Winter 2019). The alt-right, however, is not just a continuation of traditional far-right groups, but something that is uniquely different (Daniels, 2018;Reid & Valasik, 2020b). ...
... Far-right groups, and the white power movement more broadly, were early adopters of digital technologies and the Internet to communicate with other and create virtual Aryan free spaces where adherents can post to forums, share content (videos, photos, documents, etc.), play racist video games, listen to white power music, and even indoctrinate children (Belew, 2018;Daniels, 2009;Simi & Futrell, 2006. Traditionally, far-right groups were relegated to niche online communities, such as The Daily Stormer, Stormfront, or Iron March, restricting their rhetoric and worldview to Alt-Tech echo chambers (see Daniels, 2018;Donovan et al., 2022;Perry & Scrivens, 2019;Reid & Valasik, 2020b;Scrivens, 2021;Sunderland, 2022;Winter 2019). Over the last decade, the proliferation of social media platform usage and the ubiquity of the Internet accelerated far-right groups, particularly alt-right gangs, to asymmetrically extend their reach to mainstream audiences making white power content readily avail- ...
The continued public presence of far‐right groups, particularly alt‐right gangs (e.g., Proud Boys) participating in mass demonstrations and protests across the United States has made it clear that these groups and their behavior remain a concern. The overall lack of knowledge among policy makers, law enforcement, and community residents on how to deal with alt‐right gang members has limited their ability to intervene and prevent violence. The misconception that alt‐right gangs are domestic terrorist organizations, primarily driven by racist ideology, ignores just how unrefined and rudimentary the beliefs that connect members together actually are. The reliance on ideology has limited the inclusion of alt‐right gangs in conventional gang studies and has directly impacted gang scholars' ability to understand group dynamics among these far‐right gangs. This has in turned skewed also how law enforcement is trained to identify and deal with alt‐right gangs. This manuscript overviews the need to rectify the historical apathy of traditional gang scholars and law enforcement in dealing with far‐right/alt‐right gangs. We conclude with a discussion on how the mainstreaming of alt‐right groups over the last few years has accelerated and the growing need to explicitly treat these groups as street gangs.
... This network was later shared with Aryan Nations as a way they could collaboratively avoid the ban on sending their publications through the US Mail. This network grew in the 1990s, eventually facilitating racist video gaming (Winter, 2019). ...
... It's fair to say that hate groups were at the forefront of digital technology long before journalists. And, while this far-right revolution failed to materialize in the time frame suggested-with the exception of Klan leader Don Black's Stormfront-hate groups did find an impetus for growth in 2008 (Winter, 2019). ...
Digital Journalism and the Facilitation of Hate explores the process by which digital journalists manage the coverage of hate speech and "hate groups," and considers how digital journalists can best avoid having their work used to lend legitimacy to hate.
Leaning on more than 200 interviews with digital journalists over the past three years, this book first lays the foundation by discussing the essential values held by digital journalists, including how they define journalism; what values they consider essential to the field; and how they practice their trade. Perreault considers the problem of defining "hate" and "hate groups" by the media, acknowledging journalism’s role in perpetuating hate through its continued ideological coverage of marginalized groups. Case studies, including the January 6 U.S. Capitol siege, the GamerGate controversy, and the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, help to elaborate on this problem and illustrate potential solutions. Digital Journalism and the Facilitation of Hate draws attention to the tactics of white nationalists in leveraging digital journalism and suggests ways in which digital journalists can more effectively manage their reporting on hate.
Offering a valuable, empirical insight into the relationship between digital journalism and hate, this book will be of interest to students, scholars, and professionals of social and digital media, sociology, and journalism.
... This network was later shared with Aryan Nations as a way they could collaboratively avoid the ban on sending their publications through the US Mail. This network grew in the 1990s, eventually facilitating racist video gaming (Winter, 2019). ...
... It's fair to say that hate groups were at the forefront of digital technology long before journalists. And, while this far-right revolution failed to materialize in the time frame suggested-with the exception of Klan leader Don Black's Stormfront-hate groups did find an impetus for growth in 2008 (Winter, 2019). ...
The expansion of hostility against journalists and the mainstreaming of white nationalist ideologies globally necessitate a much-needed elaboration of the problem of hate. In particular, this chapter aims to expose a vulnerability in the production of digital journalism. Journalists are not just bystanders in the problem of hate, but in some ways are unintentionally culpable for the rising visibility of hate. This chapter overviews the text and additionally considers how journalists conceptualize the problem of hate.
... The white nationalist movement has long been woven into the cultural fabric of the US, but the 2016 election brought a new political voice into the cultural lexicon: the "altright." The alt-right has harnessed the internet to recruit adherents through eye-catching memes, humor, and trolling (Winter 2019;Grant and MacDonald 2020;Bezio 2018;Dignam and Rohlinger 2019). Through their multi-sited online presence, the alt-right has brought together formerly distinct cybergroups of white nationalists (DeCook 2018), the manosphere (Zuckerberg 2018;Van Valkenburgh 2021), and strings of the male gaming community known for their misogyny (Blodgett and Salter 2018). ...
... The lasting endurance of Stormfront has been due to his transforming the site into a digital community and forum in 2001 (Daniels 2009;Hartzell 2020). Presently, the community boasts a membership of 330,000, including notable white supremacists Edward Field, Thom Robb, and David Duke and has over 30,000 daily guest visits, primarily from the United States (Bjork-James 2020; Bliuc et al. 2019;Winter 2019;Hartzell 2020). The average user age increased from 31 in 2001 to 42 in 2016, reflecting the site's success in retaining long-term users committed to the cause (Törnberg and Törnberg 2021). ...
The alt-right community serves as a gateway into the white nationalist movement. However, more research is needed on how the alt-right’s virulent misogyny interfaces with white nationalist masculinity premised on patriarchal protection of white femininity. This study addresses this question through a qualitative analysis of a white nationalist forum, Stormfront.org, and finds two masculine strategies vying for site dominance. These two gender strategies draw on different movement ideologies, white nationalist or alt-right. Users battle over the prime adversary used to construct movement identity and mobilize against. I argue forum conflict reveals that defining a central adversary is necessary for a masculine social movement to achieve a collective ‘movement masculinity’ through a unification of goals and strategies. These findings contribute to research on masculinity and social movements by showcasing that not only is there diversity in extreme-right masculinity but that there is significant contestation among different masculine strategies.
... In response to the delegitimization of racist ideology worldwide in the second half of the 20 th century, the alt-right movement organized itself online around issues of white identity and Western civilization (Winter 2019). The movement gained prominence during the 2016 Presidential election when the US media depicted it as the obscure source of Trump's support, (Kelly 2017;Winter 2019). ...
... In response to the delegitimization of racist ideology worldwide in the second half of the 20 th century, the alt-right movement organized itself online around issues of white identity and Western civilization (Winter 2019). The movement gained prominence during the 2016 Presidential election when the US media depicted it as the obscure source of Trump's support, (Kelly 2017;Winter 2019). 3 Since then, the movement has evolved, and scholars have identified multiple drivers to explain its rise (Esposito 2019;Gallaher 2021;Ganesh 2020;Kelly 2017;Love 2020;Nagle 2017;Vandiver 2020). ...
In the process of shifting far-right ideas from the fringes to the centre of the political spectrum, the alt-right has infiltrated online spaces to mainstream extremist ideas. As part of this process, female alt-right influencers have emerged within various popular social media platforms and fringe outlets, seeking to build credibility for the movement with new audiences. Contrary to previous assumptions about women as harmless adherents of far-right ideology, alt-right women are emerging as “organic intellectuals”, influential in the formation of everyday beliefs and principles in congruence with the tenets of far-right ideology. Their narratives strategically weave far-right ideological discourses, such as the imminent crisis of white identity, with topical matters on lifestyle and well-being. This article examines the rhetoric of online influencers as they shape an ideological space which is contributing to the normalization or mainstreaming of far-right ideas. In doing so, it addresses two questions: How do alt-right female influencers narrate a far-right identity? How do they mainstream white supremacist ideas online? Drawing on new empirical material from a series of far-right podcasts, this article demonstrates that alt-right women strategically construct a “liberated” female identity rooted in femininity, traditionalism and gender complementarity, and problematize feminism and women’s emancipation as constitutive of the crisis facing the white race. It further identifies the presence of an elaborate cultural narrative around white victimhood which alt-right influencers use to mainstream their ideology. To counter the perpetuation of far-right ideas in society, women’s participation in shaping far-right ideology should not remain unaddressed. This article sheds some light on how a small but highly visible group of influencers are actively working to promote a dangerous far-right ideology.
... Racist. Racist groups have been highly prevalent on the internet, and on Reddit in particular (Chandrasekharan et al. 2017), as have a uniquely online group known as the altright, an extreme political movement that gained popularity through its utilization of the unique characteristics of social media (Winter 2019). The alt-right believe that the cultural identity of white individuals is at risk, with movements for social justice and political correctness being seen as principal threats (Center 2023). ...
Many online hate groups exist to disparage others based on race, gender identity, sex, or other characteristics. The accessibility of these communities allows users to join multiple types of hate groups (e.g., a racist community and misogynistic community), which calls into question whether these peripatetic users could be further radicalized compared to users that stay in one type of hate group. However, little is known about the dynamics of joining multiple types of hate groups, nor the effect of these groups on peripatetic users. In this paper, we develop a new method to classify hate subreddits, and the identities they disparage, which we use to better understand how users become peripatetic (join different types of hate subreddits). The hate classification technique utilizes human-validated LLMs to extract the protected identities attacked, if any, across 168 subreddits. We then cluster identity-attacking subreddits to discover three broad categories of hate: racist, anti-LGBTQ, and misogynistic. We show that becoming active in a user's first hate subreddit can cause them to become active in additional hate subreddits of a different category. We also find that users who join additional hate subreddits, especially of a different category, become more active in hate subreddits as a whole and develop a wider hate group lexicon. We are therefore motivated to train an AI model that we find usefully predicts the hate categories users will become active in based on post text read and written. The accuracy of this model may be partly driven by peripatetic users often using the language of hate subreddits they eventually join. Overall, these results highlight the unique risks associated with hate communities on a social media platform, as discussion of alternative targets of hate may lead users to target more protected identities.
... The pivotal role played by network technologies, particularly social media platforms, extends beyond the Trump and Bolsonaro campaign strategies and was found to be central to the "de-marginalization" of far-right movements (Winter, 2019). The distributed architecture of social platforms allowed such groups to overcome perennial problems with recruiting and to ultimately expand their audience with a populist rhetoric (Inglehart & Norris, 2016). ...
In this paper we unpack the 2022 Brazilian Presidential campaign marked by multiple claims of electoral fraud and support for a coup d’état by supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro. We identify the narrative frames underpinning the insurrectionist playbook by analyzing Bolsonaro’s statements during the presidential campaign. We subsequently test the penetration of this playbook on members of the Brazilian National Congress during the campaign trail and the transition of power to the opposition candidate, when pro-Bolsonaro protesters attempted to overthrow the Federal Government. Our analyses lend support to the hypothesis that the coup d’état was not successful due to the dwindling support beyond the hard-core Bolsonaro base. Our results also show that the insurrectionist playbook, largely centered on the blueprint of false claims of electoral fraud, can be monitored through the public statements of elected officials. We conclude with a discussion of our findings and recommendations for future research.
... Deplatforming has previously been a growth-engine for Telegram. When many prominent far-right internet celebrities were deplatformed in the last few years, many moved to Telegram (Rogers, 2020;Winter, 2019). Besides the perceived privacy and security of Telegram, it's libertarian view on content moderation seems to be one of the reasons for the platform's popularity with these actors. ...
This chapter looks at the mutual shaping of platform architectures and norms through the lens of ‘affordances’, from an integrated perspective of Media and Communication Studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS). ‘Affordances’ are emergent relational properties of an individual and its environment. Affordances can help us discover the possible complex environmental factors shaping social interaction, avoiding monocausal perspectives of technological determinism and social constructivism (Gaver, W. W., Ecological Psychology 8: 111–129, 1996; Volkoff, O., & Strong, D. M., Affordance theory and how to use it in IS research. Routledge, In The Routledge Companion to Management Information Systems, 2017). Largely missing from existing conceptualisations of affordances is a collective or ‘social’ perspective on social media.
In particular we investigate which affordances are relevant for normative processes in collectives, by which we mean the establishment, maintenance, and transformation of norms. In this book chapter we first discuss what is meant by ‘affordances’, pinpointing our interest in ‘social affordances’ and what we precisely mean by ‘normative processes’. We identify these affordances with a walkthrough of Telegram, for which we use the walkthrough method (Light, B., Burgess, J., & Duguay, S., New Media & Society 20: 881–900, 2018). Following the explanation of this methodology, we position Telegram as a platform, its vision, operating model, and the presumed user base of this messaging app. We then present the findings of the walkthrough method by explicating the relevant affordances for normative processes.
... In the online spaces of the Trump-adjacent alt-right, meanwhile, angry white men congregate to mourn their perceived loss of privilege, finding community and solace in reactionary and extremist politics (Kelly 2017, Kosse 2022, Winter 2019. Affect plays a central role in representations of white victimization (Ganesh 2020), permeating online alt-right forums in recurring discourses of anxiety about the loss of status and victimization of whites (Lorenzo-Dus & Nouri 2021). ...
This article presents a multimodal critical discourse analysis of #GaysForTrump on Twitter as a discursive formation within Trumpism with distinct subject positions connected to specific acts of identification, libidinal investments, and a homonationalist allegiance to the United States, constructed as a homotopia for cisgender, white gay men. Trumpism is a political formation with its own discursive and structural dynamics that we argue have bred a specific strain of homonationalism worth unpacking in its specificity. Our main objective was to understand how identifying as gay was articulated as commensurate with Donald Trump’s particular brand of transgressive and masculinist white nationalism. We identified three overarching discursive strategies: the appropriation of the “coming out” narrative to validate the #GaysForTrump victimization experience; the construction of conservative gay masculinity as desirable; and the articulation of a sexual geopolitics that legitimates the extreme xenophobia of Trumpism.
... The pivotal role played by network technologies, particularly social media platforms, extends beyond the Trump and Bolsonaro campaign strategies and was found to be central to the "de-marginalization" of far-right movements (Winter, 2019). The distributed architecture of social platforms allowed such groups to overcome perennial problems with recruiting and to ultimately expand their audience with a populist rhetoric (Inglehart & Norris, 2016). ...
This study unpacks the 2022 Brazilian Presidential campaign marked by multiple claims of electoral fraud and calls for a coup d’état by supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro. We identify the narrative frames underpinning this insurrectionist playbook by analyzing Bolsonaro’s statements during the presidential campaign. We subsequently test the penetration of this playbook on members of the Brazilian National Congress during the campaign trail and the transition of power to the opposition candidate, when pro-Bolsonaro protesters attempted to overthrow the Federal Government. Our analyses lend support to the thesis that the coup d’état was not successful due to the dwindling support beyond the hard-core Bolsonaro base. Our results also describe an insurrectionist playbook largely centered on the blueprint of false claims of electoral fraud, a playbook that can be monitored through the public statements of elected officials. We conclude with a discussion of our findings and recommendations for future research.
... The far right has been clearly one beneficiary of the increased importance of social media for political mobilisation (Winter 2019). Its tech-savvy activism contributed to the enormous reach of its messages compared to pre-digital conditions. ...
... As a result, far-right groups have proliferated online, both on traditional social media (Winter, 2019) and on smaller, niche platforms known as "alt-tech" platforms, since they collectively frame themselves as alternatives to larger platforms (Wilson & Starbird, 2021). Within alt-tech platforms, far-right movements organize and mobilize offline events (Ekman, 2018), discuss and reframe mainstream narratives (Peucker & Fisher, 2023), and facilitate more amenable spaces for far-right rhetoric (Urman & Katz, 2022). ...
Given that political groups are dispersed across platforms, resulting in different discourses, there is a need for more studies comparing communication across platforms. In this study, we compared posts about #StopTheSteal from three social media platforms after the 2020 US Presidential election and preceding the January 6 Capitol Riot. To do so, we utilized Snow and Benford’s typology of social movement frames—diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational frames—in the context of far-right movements and an additional frame device: violence cues. This study focused on the following three social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, and Parler. We built three corpora of social media data: 26,093 Facebook posts, 248,643 tweets, and 400,600 Parler posts. Using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) classifiers, dictionary methods, and qualitative text analysis, we find that the use of these frames varies by platform, with users on the alt-tech platform Parler using violence cues such as “smash” and “combat,” suggesting a greater call to action relative to the mainstream platforms.
... Moreover, research has provided evidence of the role of online-and social media discourses in the normalisation and mainstreaming of far-right opinions and ideology (Krzyzanowski et al., 2021;Winter, 2019;Åkerlund, 2022). Online forums cultivate uncivil discourse and facilitate expressions of opinions stretching the boundaries of norms in the socio-political landscape (Krzyzanowski & Ledin, 2017). ...
The overall aim of this study is to explore the authoritarian dimension in the far-right discourse of online forums. The study argues for a focus on the articulations of authoritarianism to understand the dynamics of far-right discourse. Four central features of authoritarianism are identified and explored: 1) the authoritarian values underlying articulated opinions on diverse issues; 2) the emotional dimension of authoritarianism; 3) the coexistence of civil and uncivil articulations of authoritarianism; and 4) the role of mainstream news as reference for and trigger of authoritarian responses. The qualitative study is based on data from two Swedish forums, Flashback and Familjeliv [Family life], and consists of 79 threads related to three issues on the agenda: disorder in school, gang crime, and transgender. The results show expressions of authoritarian–liberal value conflicts, and, most significantly, the vigour of an authoritarian culture on the forums, with implications for the normalisation of far-right discourse.
... While activists of the BJP and of other far right Hindu chauvinist groups in India routinely connect themselves to the global far right via You Tube, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, by far their largest reach is within the Global South and the Indian diaspora through social media apps such as Telegram, WhatsApp and Messenger. In these spaces both national and transnational activists whose activism has been mainstreamed by the media (through a strategic incorporation of racist discourses as a defense of liberalism/civilization and a disavowal of extreme violence as "fringe") can make calls for violence and/or genocide against refugees, Muslims, Black people, Indigenous people, and so on, with little chance of effective opposition (Winter, 2019). ...
The word activism tends to conjure different imagery depending on the institutional and geopolitical context. However, in left progressive circles it has usually connoted something challenging towards or resistant to injustice, and aligned with broadly progressive and democratic values. As recently as 2012, social media were being lauded as a new means of progressive social change in a bouquet of other tools against autocracy in the Global South. Based on original interviews over the past five years, this article outlines starkly, and from an intersectional socialist-feminist perspective, the dangers of allowing a warm fuzzy conception of activism to divert attention from the fascist politics being enacted online across vast swathes of the Global South, including in Brazil and India.
... A variety of virtual Aryan free spaces exist, allowing for alt-right gang members to chat (direct message), plan activities or gathering, post social media content (i.e., memes, videos, photos, documents), listen to white power music, play racist video games and even indoctrinate children (Castle and Parsons, 2019;Daniels, 2009;Lewis, 2018;Miller-Idriss, 2020;Simi and Futrell, 2015). Traditionally, the white power movement repressed their communications to niche communities online, such as Stormfront or The Daily Stormer (Daniels, 2018;Perry and Scrivens, 2019;Winter, 2019). Unlike the veteran groups in the white power movement, the profciency and prevalence of alt-right gangs' membership at employing mainstream digital communication to propagandize, harass rival groups, enlist new members and maintain robust connections with active members is what makes these far-right groups unique (DeCook, 2018;Fielitz and Thurston, 2019;Klein, 2019;Miller-Idriss, 2020;Nagle, 2017;Reid et al., 2020;Ross, 2020;Simi and Futrell, 2015). ...
The mythos surrounding white power groups, such as racist skinheads, requires a critical analysis. This is especially true for demystifying the belief that, white power youth groups (i.e., alt-right gangs) are substantially different from conventional street gangs. This chapter aims to critically evaluate the existing gang definitions used by academics and the criminal justice system to rectify the apathy of attention by traditional gang scholars and law enforcement to the white power gang problem. This disconnect is most notably observed in the absence or under-reporting of white gang members in gang databases throughout jurisdictions across the United States. This legacy of underpolicing of alt-right gang members by legal authorities and/or racist policies is known as “white supremacy in policing.” The public resurgence of the white power movement with alt-right gangs (e.g., Proud Boys) participating in mass demonstrations and protests across liberal and progressive urban centers throughout the United States and abroad concerns community residents, policy makers, and practitioners. Yet, the lack of knowledge about how to deal with the members of these alt-right gangs is a problematic and a growing concern. Additionally, the premise that alt-right gangs as a domestic terrorist organization driven solely by racist, ideology greatly overestimates how rudimentary and unrefined the beliefs that loosely bind members together actually are. For instance, it is not uncommon for alt-right gangs to have non-white members who are drawn in by the groups’ misogyny and male supremacism. Similar distorted perceptions of existing in an organized way to achieve a common goal have existed for a variety of street gangs (e.g., Bloods, Crips, Folks, Peoples) and even transnational organizations (e.g., Mara Salvatrucha [MS-13]), exerting control over gang sets in every urban city across the globe. This misperception has tainted public perception and policy responses to these groups. As such, the use of ideology as a reason to limit the inclusion of white power youth in gang studies has impacted how gang researchers study white power groups, how they train law enforcement about street gangs, and the policies they support and help implement.
... The latter is particularly of interest for combating the spread of hate speech since only content moderation via flagging, banning, or deleting posts may not be enough in this context [7,39,26] (it may often incur threats to the democratic principles [37]). It is unanimously agreed that certain malicious groups take advantage of the apparent anonymity on these platforms to create and propagate hateful content [23,52,34]. However, it is unlikely that a handful of malevolent actors could dictate the largescale characteristics of such platforms; the inner workings of these platforms [24], reinforced by the real-world social processes [53], should be investigated for how they prepare the breeding ground for online hatemongering. ...
Recent years have witnessed a swelling rise of hateful and abusive content over online social networks. While detection and moderation of hate speech have been the early go-to countermeasures, the solution requires a deeper exploration of the dynamics of hate generation and propagation. We analyze more than 32 million posts from over 6.8 million users across three popular online social networks to investigate the interrelations between hateful behavior, information dissemination, and polarised organization mediated by echo chambers. We find that hatemongers play a more crucial role in governing the spread of information compared to singled-out hateful content. This observation holds for both the growth of information cascades as well as the conglomeration of hateful actors. Dissection of the core-wise distribution of these networks points towards the fact that hateful users acquire a more well-connected position in the social network and often flock together to build up information cascades. We observe that this cohesion is far from mere organized behavior; instead, in these networks, hatemongers dominate the echo chambers -- groups of users actively align themselves to specific ideological positions. The observed dominance of hateful users to inflate information cascades is primarily via user interactions amplified within these echo chambers. We conclude our study with a cautionary note that popularity-based recommendation of content is susceptible to be exploited by hatemongers given their potential to escalate content popularity via echo-chambered interactions.
... This could be explained partly by the increasing prevalence in far right studies of electoral and opinion data analysis and the little interest paid to context, concepts and history in such research, and therefore, a certain ease in selecting terms which are not only mainstream but also fuzzy enough to avoid engaging in typological and terminological debates. This is supported by the fact that party/parties are also particularly prominent in the corpus, denoting the importance of electoral studies in the field, which can at times be at the expense of other forms of politics and therefore exaggerate certain phenomena (such as the rise of far-right parties rather than abstention) or obscure others (such as the mainstreaming of ideas despite poor electoral results) (see amongst others Brown et al. 2021;Krzyżanowski 2020;Wodak 2020;Winter 2019). ...
Research on the far right has been a booming field for decades now, with far-right parties generally being much more researched than their right, centre and left counterparts, even when they are marginal in terms of politics or electoral support. Yet, for a field that is notorious for its lively definitional debates and tendency to evolve and reinvent itself terminologically, it has appeared unwilling to engage with the concepts of race, racism and whiteness, or with its very positioning in political structures. Through a mixed-methods discursive approach, this article analyses the titles and abstracts of all articles published in peer-reviewed journal in the sub-field of far right studies between 2016 and 2021 (n = 2543) to highlight which terms and concepts are primed and which are obscured. This article highlights a tendency to prime euphemising terms and concepts such as ‘populism’ and avoid those which engage with systemic and structural forms of oppression such as racism and whiteness. This article thus aims to both map and make sense of the absence of whiteness and racism in the corpus by arguing that it is a symbol of the ongoing presence of colourblind approaches and a lack of reckoning with the scale and pervasion of systemic racism in contemporary societies.
... For example, Daniels (2009) identified the ways in which Internet discussion for a breathed new life into White supremacist and far-right groups, which profited from the lower costs of publishing and circulating materials. The rise of social media actively contributed to the dissemination and mainstreaming of far-right content and hate discourses, including racism and white supremacy, xenophobia and antimigrant hate, anti-feminism and anti-LGBTQ content (Fielitz & Thurston, 2018;Ging & Siapera, 2019;Mudde, 2019;Winter, 2019). In addition, research has shown that far-right groups have successfully used the Internet for mobilization and coordination, with occasional spill over street violence (Johnson, 2018;Müller & Schwarz, 2021). ...
The COVID-19 pandemic led to the creation of a new protest movement, positioned against government lockdowns, mandatory vaccines, and related measures. Efforts to control misinformation by digital platforms resulted in take downs of key accounts and posts. This led some of these protest groups to migrate to platforms with less stringent content moderation policies, such as Telegram. Telegram has also been one of the destinations of the far right, whose deplatforming from mainstream platforms began a few years ago. Given the co-existence of these two movements on Telegram, the article examines their connections. Empirically, the article focused on Irish Telegram groups and channels, identifying relevant protest movements and collecting their posts. Using computational social science methods, we examine whether far-right terms and discourses are present and how this varies across different clusters of Telegram Covid-19 protest groups. In addition, we examine which actors are posting far-right content and what kind of roles they play in the network of Telegram groups. The findings indicate the presence of far-right discourses among the COVID-19 groups. However, the existence of these groups was not solely driven by the extreme right, and the incidence of far-right discourses was not equal across all COVID-19 protest groups. We interpret these findings under the prism of the mediation opportunity structure: while the far right appears to have taken advantage of the network opportunity structure afforded by deplatforming and the migration to Telegram, it did not succeed in diffusing its ideas widely among the COVID-19 protest groups in the Irish Telegram.
... Violent extremists now exercise an unprecedented aptitude in internet literacy. Due to social media's ubiquitous presence in society and persuasive design, violent extremists are using the technology to campaign their views, rally support for upcoming events, disseminate instructive materials, cultivate communities at a distance, and mobilise followers (Peucker et al. 2018;Winter 2019). Furthermore, videos, manifestos, and attack methodologies left by previous far-right terrorists continue to circulate online, with proceeding far-right attackers having made reference to their international and Australian predecessors-arguably contributing to the increasing lethality of attacks (Cai and Landon 2019). ...
Far-right extremism transpires in virtual and physical space. In this study, we examine how the Australian far-right extremist group ‘True Blue Crew’ attempted to coordinate their offline activities with their social media activism. To this end, we conducted a thematic content analysis of administrator posts and user comments present on the group’s Facebook page prior to and following an organised street rally in June 2017. This online analysis was partnered with ethnographic field work to gauge the perceptions of group members and supporters during the rally in Melbourne, Victoria. The results highlight the multi-dimensional and intimate manner in which online and offline contexts are coordinated to support far-right activism and mobilisation. This study offers an empirical account of how far-right attitudes, activism, and mobilisation transpired in Australia in the years prior to an Australian committing the Christchurch terror attack. It reveals a growing frustration within the broader far-right movement, leading to later strategic adaptation that can be interpreted as an early warning sign of an environment increasingly conducive to violence. This provides a more nuanced understanding of the context from which far-right terrorism emerges, and speaks to the importance of maintaining a level of analysis that transverses the social and the individual, as well as the online and the offline spaces. Implications for security and government agencies responses are discussed.
... De hecho, la evidencia sugiere que los discursos basados en el enfado y el resentimiento popular han tenido un impacto significativo en la movilización social (Betz, 2002). Una estrategia utilizada por muchos de los líderes políticos y que parece estar siendo empleada con éxito por Santiago Abascal y su formación, especialmente tras la irrupción de Vox en el Parlamento de Andalucía: sus discursos están plagados de apelaciones emocionales al miedo (Winter, 2019), la ansiedad y el enfado, animando al electorado a levantarse en contra de lo que su líder denomina «dictadura progre» (López-López y González, 2020). ...
El objetivo central de este artículo es poner de relieve la importancia del componente emocional en la explicación del apoyo electoral a la formación de extrema derecha Vox. Para ello, se analizan los componentes del voto a esta formación en las dos últimas elecciones generales —Congreso de los Diputados—, de abril y noviembre de 2019, prestando especial atención a los de carácter emocional (presencia e intensidad de distintos tipos de emociones en los votantes de Vox). Utili-zamos una aproximación metodológica cuantitativa, a partir de datos de encuestas realizadas por el Equipo de Investigaciones Políticas (EIP) de la Universidad de Santiago de Compostela. Los principales resultados presentados en este trabajo permiten concluir la existencia de un perfil alta-mente emocional entre los votantes de Vox, que se expresa en sentido positivo hacia su propio líder y su partido. Ese componente emocional también se manifiesta hacia los líderes y partidos con los que Vox contiende, si bien en sentido positivo hacia líderes y partidos de derecha y centro-derecha (PP y Ciudadanos) y en sentido negativo hacia los ubicados en la izquierda o el centro-izquierda (UP y PSOE). El análisis multivariante utilizado confirma, adicionalmente, la importancia que tuvo el componente emocional en la explicación del voto a Vox en los procesos electorales mencio-nados, componente expresado en el sentimiento de esperanza provocado por su líder, Santiago Abascal, y el de preocupación, generado por Pedro Sánchez entre los votantes de Vox.
... As with the mainstreaming of alternative far-right beliefs and ideologies more broadly, WN perspectives also find their way into the mainstream because the Stormfront community strategically appeals to mainstream whites by reformulating racist propaganda into more palatable rhetoric (Hartzell, 2020;Meddaugh and Kay, 2009) and engages with oppositional views (e.g., anti-racist) on the site, in part, to accomplish this goal but also to encourage active participation amongst community members (Bright et al., 2022). The WN ideologies of Stormfront users are then inadvertently disseminated into more mainstream online spaces by the baked in mechanisms of the Internet (Graham, 2016;Klein, 2012;Winter, 2019), as well as more mainstream right media outlets, such as the Ben Shapiro Show or The Daily Standard (Speakman and Funk, 2020). ...
Introduction
Research has indicated a growing resistance to vaccines among U.S. conservatives and Republicans. Following past successes of the far-right in mainstreaming health misinformation, this study tracks almost two decades of vaccine discourse on the extremist, white nationalist (WN) online message-board Stormfront. We examine the argumentative repertoire around vaccines on the forum, and whether it assimilated to or challenged common arguments for and against vaccines, or extended it in ways unique to the racist WN agenda.
Methods
We use a mixed-methods approach, combining unsupervised machine learning of 8892 posts including the term “vaccin*“, published on Stormfront between 2001 and 2017. We supplemented the computational analysis with a manual coding of randomly sampled 500 posts, evaluating the prevalence of pro- and anti-vaccine sentiment, previously identified pro- and anti-vaccine arguments, and WN-specific arguments.
Results
Discourse was dynamic, increasing around specific events, such as outbreaks and following legal debates about vaccine mandates. We identified four themes: conspiracies, science, race and white innovation. The prominence of themes over time was relatively stable. Our manual coding identified levels of anti-vaccine sentiment that were much higher than found in the past on mainstream social media. Most anti-vaccine posts relied on common anti-vaccine tropes and not on WN conspiracy theories. Pro-vaccination posts, however, were supported by unique race-based arguments.
Conclusion
We find a high volume of anti-vaccine sentiment among WN on Stormfront, but also identify unique pro-vaccine arguments that echo the group's racist ideology.
Public health implication
As with past health-related conspiracy theories, high levels of anti-vaccine sentiment in online far-right sociotechnical information systems could threaten public health, especially if it ‘spills-over’ to mainstream media. Many pro-vaccine arguments on the forum relied on racist, WN reasoning, thus preventing the authors from recommending the use of these unethical arguments in future public health communications.
... However, the second objective needs to be subdivided into two working hypotheses. The first of these seeks to establish whether, as the theory states, there is greater use of negative materials by those political groups holding right-wing political parties in general and radical populist right-wing political formations (Winter, 2019;Larsson, 2020b). The second hypothesis, also in line with the theory detailed above, suggests that humorous content will also be more widely used by radical right-wing formations (Lamerichs et al., 2018;Forscher, Kteily, 2020). ...
This research analyses three fundamental questions to determine how, when and by whom emotions are used in campaign materials (political propaganda). Focusing on the 2019 European elections we carry out a three-phase analysis. Firstly, we check the use of rational content against content that appeals to voters’ emotions. Secondly, we observe which of these emo tions are channelled towards the use of negative strategies and, therefore, identifying who is the object of this attack. And lastly, we determine which party families make the most use of humorous content since this resource is believed to be part of an appeal to voter’s feelings and, therefore, it is essential to know if there are differences between political groups. Considering this analytical strategy, the structure of the work begins with the contextualisation of the 2019 European elections to focus, later, on highlighting the importance of electoral campaigns as a given time when communicative activity intensifies. Once the importance of electoral campaigns has been defined the article analyses how campaign materials, in a general context of political propaganda, are one of the most powerful tools. In this sense, the analytical strategy of political parties’ campaign materials can be said to focus on the use of emotions. Data from the European Elections Monitoring Center (EEMC) has been used not only for theoretical contextualization, but throughout the whole paper.
... While Fraser (2009) invited us not to put the blame on the technology, he did caution that the sociotechnical context needs to be adjusted to new circumstances of influence. And while user-generated content (e.g., comments), by virtue of access, extends the right to free speech to all users, with the rise of phenomena such as Russian trolling and online hate groups, now more than ever we have to foster media literacy skills (Winter, 2019). ...
Description
With the prevalence of disinformation geared to instill doubt rather than clarity, Creating Chaos Online unmasks disinformation when it attempts to pass as deliberation in the public sphere and distorts the democratic processes. Asta Zelenkauskaitė finds that repeated tropes justifying Russian trolling were found to circulate across not only all analyzed media platforms’ comments but also across two analyzed sociopolitical contexts suggesting the orchestrated efforts behind messaging. Through a dystopian vision of publics that are expected to navigate in the sea of uncertain both authentic and orchestrated content, pushed by human and nonhuman actors, Creating Chaos Online offers a concept of post-publics. The idea of post-publics is reflected within the continuum of treatment of public, counter public, and anti-public. This book argues that affect-instilled arguments used in public deliberation in times of uncertainty, along with whataboutism constitute a playbook for chaos online.
Free open access: https://www.press.umich.edu/12237294/creating_chaos_online
... • Nous avons constaté que les luttes des combattantes kurdes sont instrumentalisées à (Lievrouw 2011, 19). Pour les médias de droite/d'extrême droite, les résultats ne sont pas surprenants puisque les espaces en ligne de la alt-right sont habituellement associés à la prolifération des discours haineux de toute sorte (Harmer et Lumsden 2019;Winter 2019). La couverture médiatique différente des médias alternatifs pourrait également être associée à une plus grande liberté éditoriale. ...
The aim of this article is to contribute to the debate on race and ethnicity amidst far-right internet organizations having Portugal as a case study. The main issue is to analyze how the far-right in Portugal, in spite of the small number of groupings, encompasses a huge overarching field of worldframes. There are, basically, two main ideological axis highly opposed to each other. One states that Portugal belongs to a white ethnoeuropean universe. It aims for Portugal amalgamated to a European continent where whites should be an indeniably majority, if not all its population. The other states that the Portuguese people are especially prone to miscigenate with non-white Europeans. It aims for a Portugal amalgamated with its former Empire in the tropics and supports its ideal on a Brazilian school of thought.
In this chapter, it is described how the book at hand addresses the study of small groups of the Portuguese extreme right as acting mostly in the internet due to their radical opinions. The landscape of Portuguese metapolitics comprises groups that defend a commonwealth between Portugal and its former colonies, i.e., Imperial Patriotism. Second, at the same time, exists a network of ethnonationalist groupuscules, a fact that goes against the traditional linkage of Portugal to the Catholic Church, and its distance to biological racialism. These latter, ethnonationalists groupuscules use biological terms in their online communications and include biological elements into their worldframe. The groups analyzed were chosen based on their ideologies and number of subscribers on social web platforms, specifically on Facebook. Portugueses Primeiro (Portuguese First), Escudo Identitário (Identitarian Shield), Nova Ordem Social (New Social Order / Mário Machado), O Bom Europeu (The Good European), and Invictus Portucale (Undefeated Portugal) represent the ethnocultural and racial field. Nova Portugalidade (New Portugality) and Notícias Viriato (Viriato News), in turn, represent supporters of Imperial Patriotism.
Immigration and border protection have consistently stood at the forefront of issues that divide Australians ideologically. The scholarly literature in this regard documents the role of conservative right-wing media in the formulation of anti-immigration rhetoric, particularly in relation to Muslim immigrants. This research builds on this literature, further exploring the role of ideology in shaping public perceptions. This study examines how an alternative news outlet-The Unshackled-reported on Islamic issues in 2019, the year prior to the COVID pandemic. While there is significant literature on media representations of Islam and Muslims, few studies have explored the relationship between alternative news outlets' use of 'free speech' to spread anti-Islam and anti-Muslim rhetoric and Muslim immigration to Australia. By examining the coverage of Islam by The Unshackled, this article posits that, through the frame of free speech, the outlet gave voice and authority to unreliable commentators with anti-Islam, nativist views. This led to dissemination of information that lacked credibility and factual accuracy, reinforcing an image of Islam that contributes to negative sentiments regarding the religion and its followers, and further straining relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in Australia.
Metapolitics, Algorithms and Violence argues that we need a more finegrained approach to understand contemporary far-right violence – an approach that takes language and cultural production in a digital economy seriously.
This book underlines the importance of socio-political, economic, historical and technological context in understanding the rise of the new right. More concretely, based on a digital ethnographic approach, it argues that we should understand this violence and the contemporary rise of new far-right practices and actors in relation to the theoretical renewal of ‘La Nouvelle Droite’ in the 20th century; the ‘democratization’ of new right metapolitics in the 21st century as a result of the rise of digital media; and the development of a layered, transnational and polycentric new right cultural niche in which far-right activists and terrorists produce identity, discourse, digital cultures and practices.
This work will be an engaging and necessary read for researchers interested in social media, digital culture, far-right politics, extremism and terrorism.
Among the latest concepts to burgeon from reactionary and right‐wing networks is the metaphor of the “red pill.” The term is deployed in a variety of ways – functioning as a noun, verb, and adjective – and its meaning has gradually expanded to encompass a wide ideological spectrum ranging from mainstream conservatism to far‐right extremist radicalization. In its broadest sense, the phrase “red‐pilled” is used to designate an individual who has developed a right‐of‐center oppositional consciousness against myriad dominant cultural values that undergird the project of liberal democracy, particularly with respect to gender and racial equality. As a verb, “red‐pilling” is used to denote processes of political and ideological persuasion through which red‐pilled individuals strive to awaken others into viewing the world through an alternative epistemic lens. The term is a reference to the 1999 film The Matrix , in which the protagonist is confronted with the choice to either blissfully accept his taken‐for‐granted understanding of reality – to take the “blue pill” – or to confront unpleasant, uncomfortable truths about the nature of his reality – to take the “red pill.”
Increasingly, influencers are employed to market not only products but also ideas and beliefs. The far right has recognized the strategic potential of influencer communication to tap into new target groups and mobilize supporters. This paper provides insights into the little-explored field of far-right influencers. We conceptualize them as individual actors characterized by far-right ideology, positioned as political influencers, actively advocating for their ideological aims. Employing a multi-layered computational approach to explore communication practices and networking structures of 243 German-speaking far-right influencers on Telegram, we derive a typology and observe the emergence of a functionally differentiated influencer collective. In this collective, each community has specific functions and characteristics that emphasize different ideological aspects, mobilization modes, and influencer practices. Despite the decentralized organization, we find high efficiency in information dissemination. The results corroborate the assumed potential of far-right influencers as disseminators of ideological content who can be particularly persuasive through their role as parasocial opinion leaders.
Recent years have witnessed a swelling rise of hateful and abusive content over online social networks. While detection and moderation of hate speech have been the early go-to countermeasures, the solution requires a deeper exploration of the dynamics of hate generation and propagation. We analyze more than 32 million posts from over 6.8 million users across three popular online social networks to investigate the interrelations between hateful behavior, information dissemination, and polarised organization mediated by echo chambers. We find that hatemongers play a more crucial role in governing the spread of information compared to singled-out hateful content. This observation holds for both the growth of information cascades as well as the conglomeration of hateful actors. Dissection of the core-wise distribution of these networks points towards the fact that hateful users acquire a more well-connected position in the social network and often flock together to build up information cascades. We observe that this cohesion is far from mere organized behavior; instead, in these networks, hatemongers dominate the echo chambers – groups of users actively align themselves to specific ideological positions. The observed dominance of hateful users to inflate information cascades is primarily via user interactions amplified within these echo chambers. We conclude our study with a cautionary note that popularity-based recommendation of content is susceptible to be exploited by hatemongers given their potential to escalate content popularity via echo-chambered interactions.
Zusammenfassung
Soziale Bewegungen prägen zeitgenössische Gesellschaften. Dieser Beitrag diskutiert die wesentlichen Erkenntnisse der internationalen Bewegungs- und Protestforschung und ordnet den Forschungsstand ein. Das Ziel ist es, die Aufmerksamkeit sozialwissenschaftlicher Forschung verstärkt auf Politik „auf der Straße“ zu lenken. Dabei fokussiert der Artikel auf vier zentrale Fragestellungen: die definitorische Annäherung an das Phänomenon (was sind soziale Bewegungen?), ihre Formierung (wann und warum entstehen soziale Bewegungen?), ihre Aktionsformen (wie agieren soziale Bewegungen?) sowie ihre Auswirkungen (welchen Einfluss haben soziale Bewegungen?). Abschließend plädiert der Beitrag für eine enge Verknüpfung von Bewegungs- und Protestforschung mit der Parteienforschung und der politischen Soziologie. Protest ist nicht bloß l’art pour l’art : Ohne eine Bezugnahme auf Parteipolitik und Gesellschaftsanalyse bleibt das Verständnis von sozialen Bewegungen begrenzt. Andererseits würde die Analyse von (Partei‑)Politik und gesellschaftlichen Makro-Entwicklungen von einer verstärkten Berücksichtigung sozialer Bewegungen profitieren.
Based on the assumption that social media encourages a populist style of politics in online communities and the proposition that populism and conspiracy theories tend to co-occur, this article investigates whether this holds true for YouTube influencers, particularly on the less investigated left-wing spectrum. The article provides qualitative case studies of four different groups of political content creators on YouTube whose content makes use of or analyzes popular culture. The article concludes that a populist style plays a far less central role in left-wing communities on YouTube than on other platforms or within right-wing communities.
With the proliferation of the internet, emerging groups such as the men's rights movement involuntary celibate (incel) community have new ways to reproduce real-world harm and gender-based violence (GBV) against women. This study conducts a critical discourse and semantic analysis of the incels.co webpage and the Alek Minassian van attack using the Violent Extremism Risk Assessment and the Cyber Extremism Risk Assessment tool. It reveals that Canadian violent extremism frameworks minimize online GBV as a form of extremism. GBV, which extends from online to offline realities, is not captured in theoretical frameworks for terrorism and hate speech.
Published in Shona Hunter and Christi Van der Westhuizen (2021) Routledge Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness. Abingdon: Routledge. Brexit has commonly been represented as a potential democratic revolt of the so-called 'left behind', defined as both 'white working class' and 'the people'. It has been argued that this 'revolt' had been brewing since the turn of the century, serving as vindication of this very thesis. The election of Donald Trump five months later seemed to confirm the trend-the 'white working class' had awakened to reclaim its democratic standing and make its voice heard. This narrative was well rehearsed. Perhaps most symbolically, Nigel Farage (2016), one of the main protagonists of the Brexit saga, wrote in an opinion piece in The Telegraph a month before the US election: The similarities between the different sides in this election are very like our own recent battle. As the rich get richer and big companies dominate the global economy, voters all across the West are being left behind. The blue-collar workers in the valleys of South Wales angry with Chinese steel dumping voted Brexit in their droves. In the American rust belt, traditional manufacturing industries have declined, and it is to these people that Trump speaks very effectively…. Similar takes became commonplace and reiterated not only by the very actors benefitting from these electoral successes and ideological realignment, but increasingly by their opponents. Building on a wealth of literature which has demonstrated that such readings are not only inaccurate, but politically dangerous, this chapter aims first to challenge the idea that Brexit was indeed a (white) working-class revolt, and then explore the impact of and underlying ideology behind the construction and perpetuation of such narratives. Our focus will be on racialisation and the construction of the working class and 'the people' as white. First, we turn our attention to representations of Brexit to study more precisely what was represented in the campaign, coverage and subsequent analysis and what was not. We then deconstruct what the 'white working class' narrative is predicated on and its political and ideological function, paying particular attention to the representation of white male victimisation and grievance claims. Finally, we explore what is really at stake in this reactionary backlash and its misguiding depiction.
In this article, we investigate, through corpus linguistics and qualitative approaches, YouTube responses to an advert which attempts to bring to the fore detrimental masculine toxic behaviours. With the affordances proper to the medium - anonymity, disinhibition, and de-individuation - our investigation focuses on three gendered terms representing subordinate masculinities (Messerschmidt, 2018): soy, cuck and beta, challenging ‘masculine’ attributes such as toughness, power, heterosexuality, competitiveness, and authority. These are thought to deviate from alpha masculinity between traditional opposite points: alpha men and women. The findings show that compound identities are also constructed, and deviant and subordinate masculinities are seen to be associated with political or social movements. Furthermore, comments suggest that traditional masculinity is threatened by groups of men who are considered socially inferior, provoking a (white) male sense of nostalgic entitlement. This online platform becomes a mediated space for discrimination, a softer manosphere, where anti-feminist sentiments are implicit. This article contributes to the literature on discourse and masculinities, and constructions of gender in online hostile spaces.
Social media are frequently implicated in the racist and right-wing populist mobilisations that found voice in support for Brexit. However, research tends to focus on platform affordances and fails to provide a sociological account of individuals’ actual experiences with these media, and how they interact with broader social and political experiences to impact attitudes. Based on interviews with newly passionately engaged pro-Brexit Facebook users, this article examines the trajectories by which individuals came to be so engaged. The findings demonstrate that the technological opportunities provided by social media were only significant in the context of offline experiences and socio-political factors. These include racist discourses that predate social media, a loss of trust in traditional media and government, and the opportunity provided by Brexit to articulate and activate pre-held attitudes.
Within contemporary American political discourse, the right is understood as ‘owning’ morality, which allegedly confers a rhetorical and partisan power that the left lacks due to its religiously diverse and partly areligious constituency and unwillingness to make universal statements of moral perspective with religious language. However, this aspect of right-left political difference depends on the conception of morality and moral engagement with politics as exclusively religious, and normatively conservative evangelical Christianity. These circumstances make left-wing moral engagement illegible in political discourse, but do not support the assumption in commonplace and scholarly conceptions of a right/left difference in modes of political engagement. I argue that the left moralizes uses alternate, non-religious frameworks from different discursive spheres that can be studied using moral vocabularies analysis. This project uses interview and focus group data with members of transformative media fandom to investigate how the contemporary left in America expresses moral engagement with politics in the discursive sphere of popular culture. These data align with the observations of and predictions about the American left made in both the preponderance of political science and the moral theory of Charles Taylor. Despite their lack of a normative language provided by political institutions to describe a leftist moral engagement with politics, my analysis also shows that morality is central to these fans’ engagement with politics. They draw on media texts and fandom experience as frameworks for moral expression that fellow fans will understand. This project shows the importance of looking beyond normative venues and frameworks of political discourse when studying and conceptualizing of the role of morality in politics and defining right/left political difference in contemporary American politics.
This article is a feminist framing and discourse analysis of Western media representations of women in armed conflicts. Looking specifically at the case of Kurdish women fighters, I conducted a qualitative data analysis of 125 news articles in three different media spaces. The results highlight the complex and socially constructed nature of media representations and how these representations are intertwined with larger geopolitical power relations. The analysis suggests that different actors carry the discourses on Kurdish women combatants for different purposes. While mass media and specialized media (including women’s and cultural magazines) are relatively similar in their representation of Kurdish women fighters, only the alternative media (both left and right-wing) are significantly different in their way of portraying them. While the images of Kurdish fighters are often believed to challenge the Orientalist gender stereotypes, I argue that the Western media coverage only reproduces these stereotypes by portraying them both as heroines and victims. The analysis also demonstrates the contrasted agency whether articles talk about Kurdish women vs. Western women fighters, in which the latter are part of larger discourses of “protection” and Western liberal feminism.
In 2016 and 2017, several newsrooms presented guidelines for using the term "alt-right" in the wake of events such as the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia (USA) and the US presidential campaign of Donald Trump. This study analyzed metajournalistic discourse regarding the use of the term "alt-right" including internal newsroom policies and updates to newsroom manuals and externally published public discourse. The analysis tracks how news organizations and academic and trade journalism associations participated in discourse about the use of "alt-right," and their peers' policies around use of the term. The study finds that discourse shifted from requiring contextualization of the term in the first wave to requiring journalists to define the term or not use it at all in the second wave that began with the Charlottesville rally. Journalism organizations acknowledged, at times endorsed, and used each other's statements in developing their own understandings as an interpre-tive community and a community of practice.
Canada has often been seen as a progressive country that is welcoming to immigrants, promotes multiculturalism, and generally as a kind and tolerant society. This study used a two-month close examination of Canada’s RWE online presence surrounding the 2019 federal election. Using social network analysis, this study fills a needed empirical gap in current understanding of this network that are known to produce and sustain domestic terrorism and extremist hate crimes in Canada. Then using both discourse and correspondence analysis, we find that Canada’s Right-Wing Extremists (RWEs) galvanize around the following key ideas: leftist-propensities towards violence, projecting especially views against the Antifa, anti-immigration, media corruption and dishonesty, anti-elite and anti-establishment values, anti-liberalism, populism, anti-LGBT, anti-environmentalism, biological determinism, white victimization, and anti-consumerism. By determining Canadian RWE’s ties, location and ideas our findings reveal that many RWE leaders are seen as authoritative for their views in the network and create content and community, potentially inciting active participation. As social contagion theory reminds us, these authorities in the RWE network may inspire others into concrete violent action and are of great concern to public safety.
Trolling is often enacted against women and minority groups on social media platforms, such as Twitter, as a means of limiting or undermining participation in virtual space(s). This chapter considers trolling as a form of gendered and symbolic violence. Drawing on an analysis of British national newspaper reports focusing on cases of trolling, we demonstrate that trolling can be viewed as a ‘silencing strategy’. Trolling leaves its victims in a powerless position as freedom of expression for perpetrators is defended via social media ideologies. The initial promise of social media – to provide democratizing spaces – in practice creates space for the percolation of misogynist, sexist, racist, and/or homophobic attitudes. The chapter focuses on trolling in the form of rape and death threats, women as doubly deviant when deemed to be entering men’s (online) domain(s), responses to trolling, and feminist activism.
Since the emergence of Web 2.0 and social media, a particularly toxic brand of antifeminism has become evident across a range of online networks and platforms. Despite multiple internal conflicts and contradictions, these diverse assemblages are generally united in their adherence to Red Pill “philosophy,” which purports to liberate men from a life of feminist delusion. This loose confederacy of interest groups, broadly known as the manosphere, has become the dominant arena for the communication of men’s rights in Western culture. This article identifies the key categories and features of the manosphere and subsequently seeks to theorize the masculinities that characterize this discursive space. The analysis reveals that, while there are some continuities with older variants of antifeminism, many of these new toxic assemblages appear to complicate the orthodox alignment of power and dominance with hegemonic masculinity by operationalizing tropes of victimhood, “beta masculinity,” and involuntary celibacy (incels). These new hybrid masculinities provoke important questions about the different functioning of male hegemony off- and online and indicate that the technological affordances of social media are especially well suited to the amplification of new articulations of aggrieved manhood.
As violent extremists continue to surface in online discussion forums, law enforcement agencies search for new ways of uncovering their digital indicators. Researchers have both described and hypothesized a number of ways to detect online traces of potential extremists, yet this area of inquiry remains in its infancy. This study proposes a new search method that, through the analysis of sentiment, identifies the most radical users within online forums. Although this method is applicable to web-forums of any type, the method was evaluated on four Islamic forums containing approximately 1 million posts of its 26,000 unique users. Several characteristics of each user’s postings were examined, including their posting behavior and the content of their posts. The content was analyzed using Parts-Of-Speech tagging, sentiment analysis, and a novel algorithm called ‘Sentiment-based Identification of Radical Authors’, which accounts for a user’s percentile score for average sentiment score, volume of negative posts, severity of negative posts, and duration of negative posts. The results suggest that there is no simple typology that best describes radical users online; however, the method is flexible enough to evaluate several properties of a user’s online activity that can identify radical users on the forums.
To see the Internet as only a ‘tool’ or ‘resource’ for disseminating ideas and products, as much of the literature has done, is to miss an even more significant aspect of online venues. The Internet is also a site of important ‘identity work’, in which collective identities can be accomplished interactively. This chapter explores how collective identities are constructed by white supremacists who specifically exploit the web as a venue for expressing ‘white pride worldwide’. Drawing on social movement literature around the building of collective identities, we examine the online identity work of the ‘globalizing’ right-wing extremist movement through four key frames: alternative media/alternative messaging; identity borders; shared identity; and mobilizing hate. Here, we explore the Internet not as a tool, but as site for the active construction of collective white identity.
How do people say racist things and simultaneously refute malicious intent? This study of digital racism focuses the Twitter hashtag #notracist – exploring how users on social media ‘publicly’ rebuff their expressions of racism, using either shared humour or so-called real life observations to justify their stance. The sentiment “I’m not racist, but...” is increasingly heard in a climate when public expressions of explicit racism, (misogyny and homophobia) as hate speech have become less acceptable in mainstream society. Racism denial captures everyday forms of micro-aggressions which often escape our attention, yet create the conditions for legitimating cultures of online hate. The study highlights how seemingly privatised expressions of racism are entangled with their public modes of denial.
A. Mondon and A. Winter (2018, 26 Aug.) 'Understanding the mainstreaming of the far right'. openDemocracy.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/aurelien-mondon-aaron-winter/understanding-mainstreaming-of-far-right
As seen in Wired and Time
A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms
Run a Google search for “black girls”—what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls,” the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society.
In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.
Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online. As search engines and their related companies grow in importance—operating as a source for email, a major vehicle for primary and secondary school learning, and beyond—understanding and reversing these disquieting trends and discriminatory practices is of utmost importance.
An original, surprising and, at times, disturbing account of bias on the internet, Algorithms of Oppression contributes to our understanding of how racism is created, maintained, and disseminated in the 21st century.
Winter, Aaron. 2018. ‘The Klan is History: a historical perspective on the revival of the far-right in ‘post-racial’ America’. Historical Perspectives on Organised Crime and Terrorism. eds. J. Windle, J. Morrison, A. Winter and A. Silke. Abingdon: Routledge SOLON Explorations in Crime and Criminal Justice Histories. Chapter 7.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/aaron-winter/charlottesville-far-right-rallies-racism-and-relating-to-power
This article examines the construction and functions of, as well as relationship between, the diverse and changing articulations of Islamophobia. The aim is to contribute to debates about the definition of Islamophobia, which have tended to be contextually specific, fixed and/or polarized between racism and religious prejudice, between extreme and mainstream, state and non-state versions, or undifferentiated, and offer a more nuanced framework to: (a) delineate articulations of Islamophobia as opposed to precise types and categories; (b) highlight the porosity in the discourse between extreme articulations widely condemned in the mainstream, and normalized and insidious ones, which the former tend to render more acceptable in comparison; (c) map where these intersect in response to events, historical and political conditions and new ideological forces and imperatives; and (d) compare these articulations of Islamophobia in two contexts, France and the United States.
Whether they articulate fears about freed slaves, Jews, freemasons, communists, civil rights, the federal government, the “New World Order”, or “Zionist Occupied Government” (ZOG), conspiracy theories have always been central to the American extreme-right. The extreme-right is a diverse group of right-wing movements, most notably white supremacists, white nationalists, white separatists, and neo-Nazis such as the Ku Klux Klan, American Nazi Party, National Alliance, Aryan Nations, and others who hold racist and/or anti-Semitic views, ideologies, and conspiracist interpretations and theories of history and power. Such extreme-right movements and organizations have emerged and proliferated at different points throughout American history whenever they perceive social, political, or economic developments as detrimental to the white race and/or America, from Reconstruction in the 1860s-70s through civil rights in the 1960s and the farm crisis in the 1980s to the election of Barack Obama in 2008.
Conspiracy theories have provided a vehicle for the expression and representation of the extreme-right’s fears about threats to white supremacy and America and served as justification for their political mobilization, activism, and violence. While the conspirators in such theories have included internal and external enemies or threats, there has been a consistent stable of usual suspects that relate to America’s racial, political, ideological, and regional fault-lines. Even though there have been both internal enemies and allies in such theories, external forces are rarely portrayed as anything but a threat. Following 9/11, al-Qaeda, ‘Islamist’ Extremists, the Middle East, and the wider Muslim and Arab world began to feature more prominently in extreme-right conspiracy theories and literature. While the mainstream right feared the threat posed by this region and people, the extreme-right saw them as potential allies in their war against the American government and Zionism. In response, watchdogs, academics, and other commentators have made a great deal about the link between extreme-right and Islamist conspiracy theories and potential alliances between the two movements, not just post-9/11 but retrospectively throughout the post-war era.
In this chapter, I examine American extreme-right conspiracy theories concerning the Middle East and the Muslim and Arab world, attempted alliances with Islamists and the relationship between such theories and alliances, as well as work by commentators who attempt to establish links between the extreme-right and Islamists based on their shared penchant for conspiracy theories and efforts towards alliance building. I argue that in spite of claims about overlap and alliances, attempts to forge alliances between the extreme-right and Islamists have been unidirectional, originating with the extreme-right, and largely unsuccessful. Moreover, they have tended to occur during (and thus reflect) periods of movement realignment or crisis, when the extreme-right is seeking political direction and relevance. These are periods which correspond to developments and realignments in American foreign policy and international relations that concern the Middle East and Islam. In Part One, I examine attempts by commentators to establish links between conspiracy theories, extremism and political alliances and between the extreme-right and Islamists. This is followed in Part Two with an examination of attempts by the extreme-right to form alliance with movements in the Arab and Muslim world, as well as conspiracy theories about them, in five specific periods of realignment or crisis in the post-war period: post-World War II, post-Civil Rights, post-Cold War, post-9/11, and following the election of Barack Obama.
In the spring of 2013 a British feminist campaign sought to have men’s magazines, such as Zoo, Nuts, and Loaded, removed from the shelves of major retailers, arguing that they are sexist and objectify women. The campaign—known as Lose the Lads’ Mags (LTLM)—received extensive media coverage and was the topic of considerable public debate. Working with a data corpus comprising 5,140 reader comments posted on news websites in response to reporting of LTLM, this paper explores the repeated focus on men and masculinity as “attacked,” “under threat,” “victimised,” or “demonised” in what is depicted as a sinister new gender order. Drawing on a poststructuralist feminist discursive analysis, we show how these broad claims are underpinned by four interpretative repertoires that centre around: (i) gendered double standards; (ii) male (hetero)sexuality under threat; (iii) the war on the “normal bloke”; and (iv) the notion of feminism as unconcerned with equality but rather “out to get men.” This paper contributes to an understanding of (online) popular misogyny and changing modes of sexism.
Although the subject of extreme right virtual community formation is often discussed, an online ‘sense of community’ among right-wing extremists has not been systematically analysed. It is argued that to study this phenomenon and to understand its backgrounds and function, the offline and online experiences and actions of those involved need to be taken into account. For this purpose, qualitative data has been collected on the web forum ‘Stormfront’, supplemented by extensive online interviews with eleven of its members. It is demonstrated that those experiencing stigmatisation in offline social life regard the forum as a virtual community that functions as an online refuge, whereas those who – due to special circumstances – do not experience offline stigmatisation do not display an online sense of community. It is concluded that offline stigmatisation underlies virtual community formation by Dutch right-wing extremists. Because this mechanism may have broader significance, additional hypotheses for future research are formulated.
Although the subject of extreme right virtual community formation is often discussed, an online ‘sense of community’ among right-wing extremists has not been systematically analysed. It is argued that to study this phenomenon and to understand its backgrounds and function, the offline and online experiences and actions of those involved need to be taken into account. For this purpose, qualitative data has been collected on the web forum ‘Stormfront’, supplemented by extensive online interviews with eleven of its members. It is demonstrated that those experiencing stigmatization in offline social life regard the forum as a virtual community that functions as an online refuge, whereas those who – because of special circumstances – do not experience offline stigmatization do not display an online sense of community. It is concluded that offline stigmatization underlies virtual community formation by Dutch right-wing extremists. Because this mechanism may have broader significance, additional hypotheses for future research are formulated.
In considering how terrorist movements use the Internet, it is becoming increasingly apparent that we must move beyond predominantly descriptive overviews of the contents of websites to examine in more detail the notion of virtual communities of support and the functions of these for their members. Virtual communities in support of terrorist movements are real social spaces where people interact on a regular basis to disseminate their views, share their knowledge, and encourage each other to become increasingly supportive of movements that use terrorism to achieve their goals. Taken from a larger body of comparative qualitative research investigating the content and function of discourses created in virtual communities in support of terrorism, this article presents a thematic analysis of “Stormfront,” a virtual community of the radical right.
Twitter launches hate speech crackdown
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Neidig, H. (2017). Twitter launches hate speech crackdown. The Hill, 18 December 2017.
Here’s how Breitbart and Milo smuggled white nationalism into the mainstream
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Bernstein, J. (2017). Here's How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled White Nationalism into the Mainstream.
Nazis and other extremists appear to be migrating to Google Plus after a crackdown from other social networks. The Independent
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Cuthbertson, A. (2018). Nazis and other extremists appear to be migrating to Google Plus after a crackdown
from other social networks. The Independent, 15 June 2018. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgetsand-tech/news/nazi-google-plus-facebook-twitter-white-supremacist-extremist-groups-a8401156.html. Accessed
20 June 2018.
What the red pill means for radicals
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Ganesh, B. (2018). What the red pill means for radicals. Fair Observer, 7 June 2018.
When hate went online
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Richard Spencer’s website has been pulled offline by GoDaddy
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Broderick, R. (2018). Richard Spencer's website has been pulled offline By GoDaddy. Buzzfeed, 3 May 2018.
Meet Antifa’s secret weapon against far-right extremists
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Clark, D.B. (2018). Meet Antifa's secret weapon against far-right extremists. Wired, 16 January 2018.
https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-antifa-data-mining/. Accessed 20 June 2018.
The currency of the far-right: Why neo-Nazis love bitcoin. The Guardian
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Ebner, J. (2018). The currency of the far-right: why neo-Nazis love bitcoin. The Guardian. 24 January 2018.
The biggest lie in the white supremacist propaganda playbook. Southern Poverty Law Center
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Hatewatch (2018c). The biggest lie in the white supremacist propaganda playbook. Southern Poverty Law
Center, 14 June 2018. https://www.splcenter.org/20180614/biggest-lie-white-supremacist-propagandaplaybook-unraveling-truth-about-'black-white-crime. Accessed 20 June 2018.
Facebook forbids white supremacy, but allows white separatism and nationalism
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Kozlowska, H. (2018). Facebook forbids white supremacy, but allows white separatism and nationalism. Quartz,
26 May 2018. https://qz.com/1290044/facebook-forbids-white-supremacy-but-allows-white-separatism-andnationalism/. Accessed 30 May 2018.
Making America hate again? Twitter and hate crime under Trump
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https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3149103. Accessed 20 June 2018.
A 2-for-1 for racists: Post hateful fliers, and revel in the news coverage
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Schwencke, K. (2017). A 2-for-1 for racists: post hateful fliers, and revel in the news coverage. ProPublica, 24
Reaping the whirlwind
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How tech supports hate
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Racism on the internet: Mapping neo-fascist subcultures in cyberspace
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cyberspace. In: J. Kaplan and T. Bjorgo (Eds.), Nation and Race: The Developing Euro-American Racist
Subculture. Boston: Northeastern University Press, pp. 73-101.
‘Emasculation nation has arrived
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Right-wing YouTubers think it’s only a matter of time before they get kicked off the site
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kicked off the site. Buzzfeed, 18 April 2018. https://www.buzzfeed.com/ishmaeldaro/right-wing-youtubealternative-platforms?utm_term=.tq5AqdqEVj#.ngj6rxr97M. Accessed 20 June 2018.
Update: 1094 bias related incidents in the month following the election. Southern Poverty Law Center
- Hatewatch
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Law Center, 16 December 2016. https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/12/16/update-1094-bias-relatedincidents-month-following-election. Accessed 1 April 2017.
Andrew Anglin brags about ‘indoctrinating’ children into Nazi ideology. Southern Poverty Law Center
- Hatewatch
Hatewatch (2018a). Andrew Anglin brags about 'indoctrinating' children into Nazi ideology. Southern Poverty
Law Center, 18 January 2018. https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/01/18/andrew-anglin-brags-aboutindoctrinating-children-nazi-ideology. Accessed 15 May 2018.
The year in hate: Number of hate groups tops 900
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The neo-Nazis of the Daily Stormer wander the digital wilderness
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Lavin, T. (2018). The neo-Nazis of the Daily Stormer wander the digital wilderness. New Yorker, 7 January
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Antifa: US security agencies label group ‘domestic terrorists
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All-American Nazis: How a senseless double murder in Florida exposed the rise of an organized fascist youth movement in the United States
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organized fascist youth movement in the United States. Rolling Stone, 2 May 2018.
Meet the renegades of the intellectual dark web
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Rage Grows in America: Anti-Government Conspiracies
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McInnes, Molyneux, and 4chan: investigating pathways to the alt-right. Southern Poverty Law Center
- Hatewatch
Hatewatch (2018b). McInnes, Molyneux, and 4chan: investigating pathways to the alt-right. Southern Poverty
Law Center, 19 April 2018. https://www.splcenter.org/20180419/mcinnes-molyneux-and-4chan-investigatingpathways-alt-right. Accessed 22 April 2018.
Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump
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Trump's most influential white nationalist troll
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O'Brian, L. (2017). Trump's most influential white nationalist troll. HuffPost US, 4 May 2017.
Antifa: US security agencies label group 'domestic terrorists. The Independent
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