Emotions & Belonging in Far-Right Social Media Space

The increased participation within far-right alternative platforms (Alt-Tech) is generating significant attention from scholars interested in the community’s communication patterns and dynamics. Perhaps unsurprising for a movement seeking or at least allowing uncensored (hate) speech, tons of research highlights the discourse dominating fringe social media discussions. However, can we confine and simplify the conceptualisation of these spaces as vessels for spreading outward racism, hate speech, violence, and conspiracies? Or do more nuances exist below the surface-level hatred, captivating the audience and creating an alternative means of community? And if hate speech, conspiracies, and manipulatory toxicity are not the only processes for far-right virtual belonging, then what else is?

While extremist and hate-filled discourse dominates the Alt-Tech research landscape, the blog delves deeper into the intricate emotions driving the sustained popularity of these communities. Herein, a more holistic approach is necessary to illustrate the positive communal instruments for the Alt-Tech movement and its participants, extending beyond a simplistic framing of negativity. Building on the latest work in the field, I highlight the essentiality of sentiments within these spaces.

Love & Hate

The results are grounded in the construction and maintenance of Gab’s key offering to its userbase, a new home. Utilising CGT with the thick data technique, sentiment and netnographic analysis, the article highlights the emotional and discursive processes, with community positivity at the forefront of the group’s interaction. However, that does not mean far-right extremist rhetoric is non-existent. Instead, these narratives play an effective part in group attachment, challenging the way we perceive hate-filled communications and our normative conceptualisation of positive and negative emotions.

Figure 1

Participant’s Discursive Emotions on Gab Social’s g/introduceyourself

A New Home: The Platform’s Emotional Connections

The findings demonstrate a complex emotional package of belonging on Gab (see Figure 1), dominated by positive attribution (positive – 78.5% vs negative – 21.5%) to the platform and its community. These strong emotive reactions assume various forms, ranging from religious texts and inspirational quotes to affiliation with a like-minded community, Gab’s self-proclaimed status as a bastion for free speech, a loose-based identity, and a place to escape online and offline prejudices.

What makes these positive attributes effective processes for the community’s emotional belonging are the multifaceted attachments users place on the Alt-Tech media space, where Gab is designed as a catch-all platform for the different facets of the far-right. Therefore, where one user emphasises their neo-Nazi beliefs, “globalism will be crushed, support your race and support your country 1488,” another poster is “ready to have friends and to learn from daily content.” While these participants may not share common ideological perspectives – or instead choose to accentuate a particular aspect of themselves in forming social relationships – they coexist, communicate, and connect via their shared sentimental connection to Gab.

The subgroup thus offers a primarily positive interactive space for its community members regardless of the user’s nuanced far-right affinities. At the heart of the group and the Gab community’s allure reside the foundational tenets of trust, happiness, and hope, which participants count on for their social interactions. Where do these emotive ties come from, which seldom exist on mainstream platforms or, conversely, where social media has been found to create emotional harm? To achieve these sentiments, the platform depends on an in-group superiority belief system which places Gab’s users and content on a self-righteous pedestal.

By creating this superiority-minded environment, the alt-media space supersedes dispositional distrust against social media content while simultaneously creating an echo-chambered milieu where Gab’s content and posters are “the best.” Subsequently, these conceptualisations directly translate into the numerous posts linked with anticipation, joy, and trust. For example, one user is “happy to be in a place where I can be free to be me!” while others feel open to “sharing real truths” – countering conventional narratives, histories, and facts. Therefore, the group offers an open-space environment for far-right users to freely communicate: (false) information and conspiracies, what makes them happy, their interests and thoughts, and ideological aspirations, providing an environment for counter-societal socialisation, relationships, and subcommunities to form.

These findings contribute to the overarching discourse surrounding the sense of emotional belonging prevalent among the subgroup’s userbase. While existing research portrays Gab as a technocultural refuge from experiences of social exclusion, mockery, and content moderation, this analysis reveals that the emotional bonds forged on g/introduceyourself hold a more significant importance for its users. Consequently, the userbase’s conceptualisation of the space may transcend the status of a mere social media platform, placing the virtual community as a new home.

The home characterisation reveals two interrelated facets: (1) rejection and (2) reattachment. The former depicts common grievances among the site’s participants, one of “political homelessness,” “censored by leftists,” attacked by the “woke mob,” and the other of the destruction of the “middle class,” “whites,” and Western civilisation:

Thank you @a for building this platform. I realized after the last few elections that I am politically homeless.

Reply (1) Politically homeless and politically abandoned. I feel you too.

Reply (2) I FEEL that statement -politically homeless.

Reply (3) I think we all feel a little lost right now, trying to figure out who we can trust.

Reply (4) So many of us are politically homeless. You will find camaraderie here. Join some groups. I have found many people kind and helpful.

The final reply encapsulates the transformative power of far-right media, transitioning from feelings of rejection to reattachment within the Gab community – a parallel online society or ecosystem of disenfranchised users. What is crucial to this transmutational drive is that the userbase actively turns negative sentiment into positive. Thus, the latter, reattachment, offers users a novel chance at socialising post-societal rejection, with participants referring to their joining of the network as “starting over,” a “second chance,” a “new beginning,” and a “new life starting.” Herein, the group fills its community’s social needs and desires by existing as a positive and welcoming like-minded environment for aggrieved far-right individuals.

Conclusion

Through the themes of online and offline rejection and the reattachment to the far-right’s Alt-Tech ecosystem, participants on Gab highlight the positive emotion-based communicative processes leading to their sense of belonging, attraction, and attachment on the platform – a new home. The article’s findings underscore that contemporary research often paints a one-sided and consequently flawed picture of far-right fringe social media, focusing on their hyper-negative and hate-filled environments. However, this study emphasises the importance of considering the positive drivers contributing to these platforms’ success, maintenance, and growth. Moreover, it argues that the conventional dichotomy of positive and negative sentiments may not accurately reflect how the far-right perceives their emotion-based communications. Consequently, academics should reevaluate Alt-Tech spaces through a different, multi-dimensional conceptual lens that captures the nuanced dynamics and emotion-based elements that establish and sustain these online communities. Recognising this necessity will open the field to new directions.

Jonathan Collins is a PhD student at Charles and Leiden University, focusing on the behavioural dynamics of the far-right online. 

The full article on far-right emotional belonging can be found here. 

Image rights: freepik