January 6
“Pepe the frog, the greedy merchant and #stopthesteal”: A comparative study of discursive and memetic communication on Twitter and 4chan/pol during the insurrection on the US Capitol
April 28, 2025Following the January 6 insurrection on the US Capitol, we sought to explore how two social media platforms were being used concurrently to disseminate far-right memes and discourse. Our study employs a mixed-methods approach to collect a large data set of images from 4chan/pol/ and using the “#stopthesteal” hashtag on Twitter between 1 January 2021 ...
Of Humans, Machines, and Extremism: The Role of Platforms in Facilitating Undemocratic Cognition
September 18, 2023The events surrounding the 2020 U.S. election and the January 6 insurrection have challenged scholarly understanding of concepts like collective action, radicalization, and mobilization. In this article, we argue that online far-right radicalization is better understood as a form of distributed cognition, in which the groups’ online environment incentivizes certain patterns of behavior over others. ...