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Although social media have become important venues for right-wing populist (RWP) campaigns, the content, selection, and effects of RWP messages on social media remain largely unknown. Using content and panel analysis in two studies, we investigated the potential reciprocal relationship between RWP communication on social media and citizens’ anti-immigrant attitudes, anti-elitist attitudes, and feelings of anger and anxiety. In Study 1, we analyzed 13,358 Facebook posts from German and Austrian political parties and their leading candidates. Among our results, RWP actors conveyed anti-immigrant and anti-elitist messages more often than non-RWP actors, and anti-immigrant messages especially induced negative emotional responses among followers of RWP actors. In Study 2, our analysis of data from a two-wave panel study with 559 respondents revealed that anti-immigrant attitudes drove selective exposure to RWP content on Facebook, which consequently fueled anti-immigrant attitudes, and that selective exposure to such content increased individuals’ anti-elitist attitudes and anxiety.

Paul Wilkinson Memorial Lecture, University of St. Andrews, 16 April 2015

This chapter explores the effects of the trust problem on jihadi internet discussion forums. The scarcity of non-verbal cues in digital communication facilitates deceptive mimicry, which undermines the inter- personal trust required for sensitive transactions. Open-source data from Arabic-language jihadi forums between 2006 and 2011 indicate that distrust there was high and direct recruitment rare. General trust also declined over time as policing of the forums increased. As of 2014, forums are still in use, but primarily for low-stake activities such as propaganda-sharing and ideological debate, not recruiting or operational coordination. Confidence in the authenticity of propaganda remained relatively high, due to vetting institutions and hard-to-fake video formats. A modicum of interpersonal trust also remained, thanks to reputation systems and a few relatively reliable signs of trustworthiness involving time expenditure. The trust problem is an Achilles heel for high-risk activists online, including pro-democracy activists in authoritarian settings.

Inaugural VOX-Pol Conference:
‘Violent Online Political Extremism: Setting a Research Agenda’
Kings College London: August 28-29, 2014

VOX-Pol Blog post.

Internet memes have become a popular form through which northern Chileans express frustrations with their marginalization on global, national, and local levels. At the same time, many of these memes criticize Bolivian immigrants for using resources and taking jobs from “true Chileans.” The humorous nature of these texts mitigates the extremity of embedded racial and nationalist ideologies, which are more explicitly expressed in political speech, news media, and quotidian language. This article uses critical discourse analysis to trace ideological formations across multiple online and offline instantiations, making visible a continuum of extreme speech. Through these connections, we see how anti-immigrant discourses position northern residents in a formation of nested marginality. Memes are thus a central way that disenfranchised Chilean citizens reinforce a worldview in which they consider themselves deserving of greater access to resources than Bolivians, precisely because of their marginalized position in relation to the nation.