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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.
... La comunidad, inicialmente diversa, experimentó una masculinización progresiva y su migración a plataformas como Reddit, 4chan y sitios web dedicados específicamente a esta identidad (Massanari, 2017). El cierre del subforo r/incels en Reddit en 2017 por incitación a la violencia marcó un punto de inflexión, dispersando la comunidad hacia múltiples plataformas con diversos grados de radicalización (Winter, 2019). ...
... "Maxxers": Individuos que buscan maximizar diversos aspectos personales (físico, ingresos, habilidades sociales) para superar su condición, reflejado en términos como "looksmaxxing", "statusmaxxing. o "moneymaxxing" (Winter, 2019). ...
... Radicalización en línea: El fenómeno incel constituye un caso paradigmático para el estudio de procesos de radicalización mediados digitalmente (Winter, 2019). ...
7 de marzo de 2025 Resumen Este artículo ofrece un análisis exhaustivo del fenómeno sociocultural denomina-doïncel"(celibato involuntario). A través de una revisión de la literatura académica disponible, se examina su origen histórico, evolución como comunidad en línea, tipologías identificadas, características principales y su manifestación como subcul-tura digital contemporánea. El estudio adopta una perspectiva interdisciplinaria que integra elementos de la sociología, psicología social y estudios de género para proporcionar un marco teórico que permita comprender este fenómeno complejo. Se concluye identificando las implicaciones sociales más amplias y posibles direcciones para futuras investigaciones en este campo emergente. 1. Introducción El términoïncel", abreviatura deçelibato involuntario"(involuntary celibate), hace referencia a personas, predominantemente hombres, que se autoidentifican como incapa-ces de establecer relaciones románticas o sexuales a pesar de desearlas (Ging, 2019). El fenómeno ha evolucionado desde sus orígenes como un grupo de apoyo en línea hasta convertirse en una comunidad digital con su propia terminología, creencias compartidas y, en algunos segmentos, una ideología distinctiva (Baele et al., 2019). La relevancia del estudio de este fenómeno radica en sus implicaciones sociológicas, psicológicas y, en algunos casos, en materia de seguridad pública, dado que se han docu-mentado incidentes violentos vinculados a individuos que se identifican con esta comuni-dad (Hoffman et al., 2020). Este artículo pretende ofrecer una caracterización académica rigurosa del fenómeno, evitando simplificaciones y generalizaciones injustificadas, y con-tribuyendo al corpus de conocimiento sobre subculturas digitales contemporáneas. 2. Metodología Esta investigación se fundamenta en una revisión sistemática de la literatura académi-ca publicada sobre el fenómeno incel entre 2010 y 2024. Se incluyeron estudios empíricos, análisis teóricos y etnografías digitales procedentes de las bases de datos JSTOR, Sco-pus, Web of Science y Google Scholar. Adicionalmente, se consultaron fuentes primarias 1
... In response to the data revolution and resurgence and mainstreaming of the far right, as well as the convergence of the two, in recent years, academic research and media attention have increasingly focused on the technological adaptation and sophistication displayed by the latter (Winter, 2019;Mondon and Winter, 2020). The greatest attention has been placed on the influence and impact of Web 2.0 (Miller-Idriss, 2020;Kakavand, 2022;Leidig, 2023), and particularly how groups and organizations are utilizing technological advancements and virtual networks to increase recruitment and radicalization and disseminate propaganda in non-centralized or "top-down" ways. ...
... It is widely accepted that the Web has become a virtual "forecourt" for the promotion of far-right ideology and activism, and influence on individuals receptive to recruitment and radicalization and their targets and victims (Daniels, 2009;Kingdon, 2021;Scrivens, 2021;Zempi & Awan, 2016). Analysis of the far right's use of the Web to recruit and radicalize, as well as spread their ideas, has generally focused on the content featured on websites (Back, 2002;Blazak, 2001;Brown, 2009;Levin, 2002;Perry & Olsson, 2009), and Web forums (Bowman-Grieve, 2009;Caren et al., 2012;De Koster & Houtman, 2008;Lokmanoglu & Veilleux-Lepage, 2020), but less so on the history and operation of these for the movement, organization, and wider far-right and racist systems (see Daniels, 2009;Winter, 2019). ...
... They included Louis Beam Jr's Texas Emergency Reserve (Texas Knights) and Frazier Glenn Miller's White Patriot Party (North Carolina Knights). This was most clearly expressed by Beam himself in the Spring 1984 Inter-Klan Newsletter & Survival Alert: "where ballots fail, bullets will prevail" (Ridgeway, 1990, p. 87;Winter, 2019). The Klan would be largely surpassed in this era by the more radical, fascist and explicitly antisemitic, National Alliance and Christian Identity affiliated organizations, such as Posse Comitatus, The Order, and Aryan Nations. ...
In response to the data revolution, academic research and media attention have increasingly focused on the technological adaptation and innovation displayed by the far right. The greatest attention is paid to social media and how groups and organizations are utilizing technological advancement and growth in virtual networks to increase recruitment and advance radicalization on a global scale. As with most social and political endeavors, certain technologies are in vogue and thus draw the attention of users and regulators and service providers. This creates a technological blind spot within which extremist groups frequently operate older and less well regarded technologies without the oversight that one might expect. This article examines the less well-studied traditional and official websites of the Ku Klux Klan, the most established and iconic of American far-right organizations. By incorporating non-participant observation of online spaces and thematic analysis, this research analyzes the evolution of 26 websites, from their emergence in the early 1990s to the present day. We examine the ways in which traditional printed communications and other ephemera have progressed with advances in technology, focusing on the following central elements of Klan political activism and community formation: Klan identity, organizational history, aims and objectives; technology and outreach, including online merchandise and event organization; and the constructions of whiteness and racism. The results add value and insight to comparable work by offering a unique historical insight into the ways in which the Klan have developed and made use of Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Web3 technologies.
... 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
... 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. ...
... Huertas et al. (2017) pointed out that social media is an effective marketing instrument for destination promotions. Studies in past literature emphasise information quality in various contexts, 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: ...
... In line with its birth on the Internet (Hawley 2017), the alt-right communicates this attitude of transgression through provocative memes and Internet jargon in an "edgy" appeal to youth culture (Winter 2019). The "stew" (Malmgren 2017) or "gamut" (Salazar 2018) of alt-right memes has been studied as central to the movement. ...
... Though the alt-right can be considered extremist in its own right, its goals have often been cast as moving extremist views into broader circulation and closer to mainstream societal acceptance. Alt-right media sources themselves claim to be aiming to shift the "Overton Window" (Daniels 2018) of acceptable discourse toward the far right (Winter 2019). For example, Brooks (2020) describes how the alt-right's online "it's okay to be white" campaign launders white supremacist extremist ideas through colorblind racial ideology in an attempt for acceptance, while Woodhouse (2020) notes the ways that alt-right vocabulary such as "snowflake", "redpilling" and "cuck" begin to circulate more broadly. ...
Much research has focused on the role of the alt-right in pushing far-right narratives into mainstream discourse. In this work, we focus on the alt-right’s effects on extremist narratives themselves. From 2012 to 2017, we find a rise in alt-right, 4chan-like discourse styles across multiple communication platforms known for white supremacist extremism, such as Stormfront. This discourse style incorporates inflammatory insults, irreverent comments, and talk about memes and online “chan” culture itself. A network analysis of one far-right extremist platform suggests that central users adopt and spread this alt-right style. This analysis has implications for understanding influence and change in online white supremacist extremism, as well as the role of style in white supremacist communications. Warning: This paper contains examples of hateful and offensive language.
... 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. ...
... Huertas et al. (2017) pointed out that social media is an effective marketing instrument for destination promotions. Studies in past literature emphasise information quality in various contexts, 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.
... As the first study to account for the use of Spaces by far-right online communities, this paper was foremost interested in the discursive and sharing practices used to foster social membership, socialisation, intersubjectivity, and collective identity. Consistent with prior scholarship (Winter, 2019), Spaces were found to be highly affectively polarized, replete with out-group hostility, racialised hate speech, anti-LGBTQIA + rhetoric, misogyny, and conspiracy theories. The findings reveal that racist speech frequently oscillated between overt articulations of racism, and more coded, indirect and ambivalent rhetoric (Mondon and Winter, 2020). ...
This paper presents the first scholarly study of the use of X/Twitter Spaces by far-right online communities. Spaces-X/Twitter's live audio-based platform-has become an increasingly prominent tool in the far-right's digital communication ecosystem in recent years. The popularity of Spaces with far-right users has increased in the wake of Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter in 2022 which signalled a marked rightward shift in the platform's governance, particularly its techno-libertarian, 'free speech absolutist' approach to content moderation. Through a netnography and critical discourse analysis of (n = 41) Spaces sessions from January to July 2024, this paper critically examines how online far-right communities are using the voice-mediated affordance. In particular, this research explores the discursive practices and sharing strategies employed by individuals to propagate extreme and radical ideas, as well as to cultivate group membership, collective identity, and intersubjectivity. The findings demonstrate that Spaces are being used by a diverse range of far-right online communities and sub-cultures to promulgate conspiracy theories and radical and extreme ideological content. However, the findings also revealed a high degree of apolitical, non-ideological, and more everyday sharing practices. This paper broadens our empirical understanding of how Spaces are being instrumentalised by reactionary communities, and the role of voice-mediated affordances in the amplification, socialisation, recruitment, and radicalisation of far-right ideas globally.
... Research in misogyny, masculinity, and anti-feminism (seeFerber 1997) has also filled a gap in understanding the interrelations between these ideological communities coupling with far-right subcultures online (Bratich and Banet-Weiser 2019a; Dignam and Rohlinger 2019; Ging 2019; Koulouris 2018;Leidig and Bayarri 2023;Marwick and Caplan 2018;Rothermel 2023;Rothermel, Kelly, and Jasser 2022). Indeed, the alt-right appropriated the manosphere's concept of the "the red pill"(Ging 2019;Winter 2019), and today women continue (seeBlee 2002) to play a prominent role in far-right movements online(Leidig 2023;Mattheis 2018;Tebaldi 2024). ...
The rise of the far right has captured the attention of scholars across media studies, political science, and sociology. Digital technology played an important role in the rise of the far right and has deeply shaped this global movement. Focusing on research in Western societies (primarily Europe and North America), this review takes stock of how scholars in these three disciplines have studied the intersection of the far right and digital technology. The review introduces the problem of fuzzy collectivity to understand how scholars have made sense of the far right as an assemblage of increasingly complex networks of actors distributed across websites, alternative media, and platforms. Exploring solutions to the problem of fuzzy collectivity in the literature, the review proposes that far‐right engagement with digital technology should be conceptualized as a racial project engaging in metapolitics, a term used by far‐right ideologues that understands cultural movements to be prefigurative of political change. The review then explores the intersection of the far right and digital technology today, examining how it uses technology and the context of this use. The review then identifies pathways to reintegrate critical perspectives on racism in future research on the far right and digital technology.
... The field of research on the far-right can trace its lineage back to before the age of the internet (Halperin, 2023). Research on farright groups has adapted to these groups' evolving strategic use of technology (Beck, 2002;Winter, 2019). As such, studies have increasingly focused on the online presence of these groups, examining reactions to real-world events (Bliuc et al., 2019(Bliuc et al., , 2020Oksanen et al., 2020), changes in posting patterns within far-right friendly online spaces van der Vegt et al., 2021), and the internet's role as a primary medium for global collaboration among these groups (Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2020). ...
Public Significance Statement
This systematic review synthesizes research on the use of online platforms by far-right groups to disseminate their ideologies and pursue their objectives. By analyzing studies published between 2015 and 2021, it examines the methods, strategies, and dynamics underpinning far-right online communities. The findings demonstrate the multitude of platforms that far-right communities occupy, as well as highlighting the overall lack of research looking at far-right groups that exist in both online and offline spaces. This review provides a conceptual framework for understanding the sociopolitical and psychological processes that sustain and transform these groups. It also has practical implications for policy and practice, as its findings can be used to inform strategies to counter the influence of far-right groups. The findings provide a valuable resource for policymakers, platform operators, and researchers committed to mitigating the spread of harmful narratives and safeguarding democratic values.
... In terms of deployment strategies, extremist groups often use "discursive softening" techniques in their messaging to increase mainstream acceptance and adjust their public appearance and operational approaches to maximize social acceptance (Brown et al., 2023), including embedding themselves into mainstream partisan platforms (Rothut et al., 2024). The rhetorical techniques used to shift "far-right" phraseology to "alt-right," for instance, worked as a legitimizing tool to obscure extremist group alignment with white supremacy and appeal to a broader electorate (Hartzell, 2018;Winter, 2019). This rhetorical transformation is part of a larger mainstreaming process, where fringe ideologies gradually integrate into conventional discourse, often with the help of mainstream media coverage and political channels (Rothut et al., 2024). ...
This project investigates the diffusion of hateful visual symbology in news coverage from 2015 to 2023, focusing on Pepe the Frog, a meme often linked with alt-right ideologies. Using a multimodal large language model, Large Language and Visual Assistant (LLaVA), along with structural topic modeling and qualitative visual analysis, we analyzed 4,707 articles and 6,384 images featuring Pepe across time. Our mixed-methods analysis finds that Pepe appeared more frequently as time progressed, and often without proper contextualization about the symbol’s hateful connotations. Once politicized, Pepe’s representation increasingly aligned with alt-right ideologies and candidates, particularly Donald Trump and the symbology of the MAGA movement, and spiked with the introduction of the Pepe cryptocurrency in 2023. Conceptual, methodological, and civic implications of these findings are discussed.
... Studies across Germany, Sweden, and Denmark have shown how a lot of the critiqueheavy posts with a high number of interactions share in common a reluctance towards immigrants and Islam together with praise of national identities (Kulager, 2020); see also Wollebaek et al. (2022) on the Norwegian case. Previous research has also shown how a far-right strategy in recent years has been to obtain mainstreaming enabled by social media and promoted by conservative, right-wing influencers, and online personalities (Winter, 2019). In our data, immigration was the subject of 3 of the 10 most popular posts. ...
We investigate the use of Facebook in the Danish system over a two-month period in 2021, with an increased political polarization, during the COVID-19 lockdown. Based on the analysis of 5093 posts, we find indications of how party-system dynamics shape niche parties and catch-all parties’ use of Facebook. While catch-all party members share political information with relatively low reach, niche parties are much more inclined to criticize opponents, a strategy that often produces higher interactivity. Finally, we discuss the impact of party-system dynamics on the strategic use of Facebook among different parties. Our findings indicate that the social media use of niche parties with irrelevant features is often shaped by a centrifugal logic (competition towards the poles), while the social media use of catch-all parties is often shaped by a centripetal dynamic (competition towards the center).
... To illustrate this argument, this article hopes to build on critical work on the mainstreaming of the far right. I engage especially with the work of Mondon and Aaron Winter, who, writing both individually and together, have influentially theorized how the mainstreaming of the far right has been enabled (Mondon 2013(Mondon , 2022(Mondon , 2023(Mondon , 2024Winter 2017, 2020;Winter 2019). Along with Katy Brown, both have also explored some of the unintended implications of the mainstreaming explanation, much of which relates to its uncritical adoption and reproduction in scholarly research, as well as its entrance into common parlance (Brown, Mondon, and Winter 2023; see also: Mondon 2023Mondon , 2024Mondon and Winter 2020). ...
... As a digital phenomenon, the alt-right has used different tools to construct an idealised White identity. Whereas some of its adherents have resurrected an interest in scientific racism (Hawley, 2017;Hermansson et al., 2020;Winter, 2019), promoting, for example, race realism-an alleged school of thought that defends that 'racial and ethnic distinctions are rooted in biology, rather than being mere social constructs' (Hawley, 2017: 26), other groups and individuals have found the concept of spiritual race elaborated by Julius Evola more appealing, viewing race as something that is 'revealed in one's intellectual attitude and outlook, with those of a higher 'race' being innately oriented to properly spiritual concerns, making them naturally fit to command' (Rose, 2021: 53). The tools used to construct an ideal White identity may vary, but all of them project Whites (especially men) as sort of guardians of Western civilisation because they are underpinned by White supremacist discourse. ...
Albeit in different ways, both Autonomist Marxists and Post-Marxists have proposed radical democratic theories. To Autonomist Marxists, the latest advances in capitalism would pave the way for global democracy. To Post-Marxists, the plurality of social movements would push society towards a radical model of democracy. Despite their contributions, both Autonomist Marxism and Post-Marxism have left underdeveloped the possibility that digital, affective capitalism could push society towards the opposite direction of global and radical democracy. This article explores the hypothesis that contemporary capitalism may have given birth to a multitude that aims at consolidating White, Western, and masculine supremacy. It argues that fantasies that have, for centuries, sustained the racist, xenophobic, and sexist ideological dimensions of capitalism have brought together multiple groups and individuals that have engaged in the collaborative production of conspiracy theories conveying the common belief that an idealised White/Western identity is under attack: the alt-right multitude. By merging part of the key features of the multitude proposed by Autonomist Marxists with what is known as a 'Žižekian-Lacanian-Post-Marxist theory', this article stages a dialogue between both schools of thought, opening new directions for research on how capitalism intersects with issues of race, ethnicity, and gender.
... Estas comunidades discursivas en línea han pasado de ocupar sitios concretos (foros pertenecientes al ámbito de la manosfera, portales asociados al supremacismo blanco como Stormfront, o espacios como el foro de política / pol/ dentro de la página web 4chan) a diseminarse por las redes sociales: este movimiento les ha permitido llevar sus discursos más allá de sus restringidos espacios originales, mostrando una marcada capacidad para inocular su ideología, sus términos y sus argumentos en el discurso público (Winter, 2019;Baele et al., 2020). Cabe señalar, asimismo, que el movimiento simultáneo de propagación e indefinición responde a una estrategia por la cual se aspira a resonar con el descontento de sectores amplios de la población (Castells, 2012) sin por ello alienar a aquellas personas que rechazarían de antemano etiquetas opuestas a su propia identidad, como la mencionada machosfera o supremacismo blanco (cfr. ...
Redpilled es un término con el que las comunidades en línea del espectro reaccionario identifican su posición política: aunque pueden agruparse dentro del espectro de la extrema derecha, los estudios de estos espacios destacan su carácter heterogéneo e indefinido. El presente trabajo aspira a contribuir al estudio de estas comunidades en línea considerándolas como espacios de construcción y resignificación de conceptos para la confrontación ideológica. Para ello, se argumentará que constituyen comunidades discursivas que emplean el lenguaje para conseguir objetivos ideológicos y que la doctrina kantiana del esquematismo puede contribuir a explicar el modo en que dicho lenguaje mantiene su coherencia, pese a la heterogeneidad del grupo y lo impreciso de los conceptos que se manejan.
... 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.
... Far-right extremism can culminate in criminality, violence, and terrorism; the terrorist attacks in Hanau and Christchurch and the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville are only a few recent examples. Far-right actors push their way into public discourse online and adopt modern communication trends (Winter, 2019). ...
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.
... 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.
One of Cartoon Network’s most successful shows ever, Rick and Morty (2013–present) has established a cult following for its blend of dark humour and existential themes. However, the show is more than just a representation of popular nihilism; through its sustained engagement with nihilistic themes, it also demonstrates how nihilism can be embraced, exhausted, and potentially eventually surpassed in a popular context. Drawing on Richard Hoggart’s model of “social hermeneutics,” this article analyses key episodes as a means to think through the broader trajectory of nihilism as an influential element of twenty-first century popular culture.
The aim of this article is to contribute to the debate on race and ethnicity amidst Far-right internet organizations by using Portugal as a case study. The main issue is to analyze how the Far-right in Portugal, despite its small number of groupings, encompasses a huge overarching field of worldframes. There are, basically, two main ideological axes highly opposed to each other. One axis states that Portugal belongs to a white ethnoeuropean universe. It aims at a Portugal amalgamated to a European continent in which whites should be an undeniable majority, if not all its population. Its followers are influenced by schools of thought from Europe and the USA. The other axis states that the Portuguese people are especially prone to miscegenation with non-white Europeans. It aims at a Portugal amalgamated with its former Empire in the tropics and bases its ideal on thoughts emerged in Brazil. I conclude that both ideological lines cleave the Portuguese groupuscular right and give a very particular tone to Metapolitics.
Keywords:
Metapolitics; far-right; groupuscularity; portugalidade [portugality]; identitarianism; white identity politics
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.
Contrarian groups, notably Intellectual Dark Web, Alt-lite, and Alt-right, are present across the Web, ranging from fringe websites to mainstream social media. Such massive presence raises major concerns as contrarians often engage in the spread of conspiracy theories and hate speech toward particular groups of people. Historically, there is a general sense that these groups exhibit different degrees of extremism, with Alt-right standing out as the most extremist one. In particular, prior work often takes participation in Alt-right communities as a proxy for radicalization. Yet, to which extent are these groups really different? While most previous analyses have focused on a content consumption (i.e., viewer) standpoint, no prior work analyzed these groups (i.e., contrarians) from a content production perspective. Are there significant differences in the content produced by them? Toward tackling this question, we here analyze the textual data associated with videos shared by the three aforementioned groups. Specifically, we analyze 14 years of content produced by contrarians on YouTube with data from 355,000 videos. Firstly, we assess the degree of toxicity of the content created by each contrarian group, comparing them to one another and, for control purposes, against traditional media content. The results show that all contrarian groups have a more skewed toxicity distribution than traditional media. Yet, all three groups exhibit very similar textual toxicity properties. Further analyses based on psycholinguistic properties and semantic (text) classification reinforce the observation that indeed there is great similarity among the content created by all three contrarian groups. These results suggest that, despite the different definitions, the three contrarian groups are indeed much more similar, in terms of the content produced and shared by them, than the general wisdom (and literature) seems to suggest. Moreover, we also identify a significant temporal increase in content toxicity in all three groups, corroborating prior observations regarding the escalation in the harmfulness of online speech over the years.
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.”
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.
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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A 2-for-1 for racists: Post hateful fliers, and revel in the news coverage
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‘Emasculation nation has arrived
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