Mathilda Åkerlund

Umeå University | UMU · Department of Sociology

This paper uses the Swedish, once neo-Nazi expression culture enricher (Swedish: kulturberikare) as a case study to explore how covert and coded far-right discourse is mainstreamed, over time and across websites. A sample of 2,336 uses of the expression between 1999 and 2020 were analysed using critical discourse analysis. The findings illustrate h...

The study presented in this article explores the processes through which influence takes shape in eclectic online forums with few vanity metrics. Using a dataset of 7.5 million posts in the large Swedish online discussion forum Flashback, it explores who becomes influential, their strategies for appealing to the community, and others’ support of th...

This paper analyses how Sweden has come to be imagined and represented on the websites of US far right organisations since the start of the so-called ‘migration crisis’ of 2015. It focused specifically on when Sweden is discussed by the US far right and in relation to what events, and what values and associations are attributed to Sweden. The analy...

This paper analyses how immigrants are understood by Swedish alternative media and the role that Islamophobia plays, if at all, in these representations. What is remarkable is that although all articles were sampled explicitly to discuss Ukraine, the analysis showed that Muslim immigrants figured with unexpected frequency throughout. The value of t...

This article analyses the ‘free speech’ online forum Flashback, which adheres to a strict non-interference policy when it comes to user-generated content, but beyond this also forbids users from deleting their own content or accounts. Through a qualitative content analysis, this article sought to understand the relationship between the platform and...

In recent years, several high-profile political protests and social movements have formed on and through social media. Whereas most large-scale datasets address singular social media movements political topical discussions, or events, Tweets Across the Political Spectrum 2016-2020 (TAPS) instead provides access to social media data on a broad range...

In this paper, we explore how highly visible users in the context of #BlackLivesMatter on TikTok shape the narrative around Black victims of police brutality, the understanding of these narratives by others, and the potential consequences of these portrayals for the movement at large. To examine these dimensions, we analysed the 100 most circulated...

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 ro...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly becoming an important technology, affecting our everyday lives, and is predicted to do so even more extensively in the coming years. Still, the concept remains somewhat fuzzy. As IoT continues to grow in importance and scope, so does the need to understand how the concept is used and what it represents. This...

Tillgången till stora datamängder online har inneburit möjligheter att utforska nya studieobjekt och forskningsfrågor, och givit upphov till nya storskaliga digitala analysmetoder. Men innan sådana analyser kan påbörjas behöver data först samlas in. Automatiserade datainsamlingsmetoder kan utnyttja de stora mängder data som finns tillgängliga onlin...

Using a combination of descriptive statistics, sentiment analysis and close readings of a collection of 74,336 Swedish tweets, this article explores the platform usage patterns of users who are influential in a Swedish far-right discourse on Twitter and how these users help to (re)produce far-right discourse. Specifically, it focuses on their use o...

Facebook has faced growing criticism regarding its handling of hateful user-generated content (UGC) with research revealing how the platform can foster both covert and overt racism. This research has tended to focus on racist content while relying on abstract references to the general logics of social media platforms. In this article we consider ho...

This article analyses the discursive representations of trans people in 15,901 mainstream Swedish newspaper articles between 2000 and 2017 using topic modelling and critical discourse analysis. Drawing from critical perspectives on gender it was found that the articles to various degree assisted in maintaining heteronormativity. The discursive stra...