Online Library

This paper analyzes the meaning of iconography that constitute memes by reviewing a collection of memes propagated on social media related to the Kyle Rittenhouse shooting of protestors in Wisconsin. The authors collected 355 images from 37,774 tweets, supplemented by images found in Facebook groups, militia forums, and right-wing meme repositories related to Kyle Rittenhouse. The paper leads with an introduction to the American “alt-right” movement and the Rittenhouse shootings. The paper’s methodology deconstructs each meme into a set of constituent parts. This provides a process for classifying memes based on their templates, “aesthetic,” branding, events, iconography, and seemingly ambiguous references. This allows researchers to better attribute memes to specific socio-political and cultural groups, analyze the intent of the messaging, and situate memes in the broader knowledge base that, over time, solidifies into its own entity with its own kind of social and political agency.

Radical right actors routinely use social media to spread highly divisive, disruptive, and anti-democratic messages. Assessing and countering such content is crucial for ensuring that online spaces can be open, accessible, and constructive. However, previous work has paid little attention to understanding factors associated with radical right content that goes viral. We investigate this issue with a new dataset (the ‘ROT’ dataset) which provides insight into the content, engagement, and followership of a set of 35 radical right actors who are active in the UK. ROT contains over 50,000 original entries and over 40 million retweets, quotes, replies and mentions, as well as detailed information about followership. We use a multilevel model to assess engagement with tweets and show the importance of both actor- and content-level factors, including the number of followers each actor has, the toxicity of their content, the presence of media and explicit requests for retweets. We argue that it is crucial to account for role of actors in radical right viral tweets, and therefore, moderation efforts should be taken not only on a post-to-post level but also on an account level.

The presidency of Donald Trump was marked by a period of populist and sometimes extremist right-wing policies and rhetoric, and an escalation of ‘culture wars’ between the left and right in politics and society. He also gained the devoted support of numerous right-wing and so-called alt-right groups, such as QAnon, a conspiracy theory group that first emerged in 2017. This paper takes the novel approach of exploring the existence of a moral panic having formed around the activities of QAnon itself. I suggest that the current regulatory discourses around QAnon are flawed, with insufficient attention being paid to a wider range of extremist groups in assessing how to regulate extremist speech and action.

In the process of shifting far-right ideas from the fringes to the centre of the political spectrum, the alt-right has infiltrated online spaces to mainstream extremist ideas. As part of this process, female alt-right influencers have emerged within various popular social media platforms and fringe outlets, seeking to build credibility for the movement with new audiences. Contrary to previous assumptions about women as harmless adherents of far-right ideology, alt-right women are emerging as “organic intellectuals”, influential in the formation of everyday beliefs and principles in congruence with the tenets of far-right ideology. Their narratives strategically weave far-right ideological discourses, such as the imminent crisis of white identity, with topical matters on lifestyle and well-being. This article examines the rhetoric of online influencers as they shape an ideological space which is contributing to the normalization or mainstreaming of far-right ideas. In doing so, it addresses two questions: How do alt-right female influencers narrate a far-right identity? How do they mainstream white supremacist ideas online? Drawing on new empirical material from a series of far-right podcasts, this article demonstrates that alt-right women strategically construct a “liberated” female identity rooted in femininity, traditionalism and gender complementarity, and problematize feminism and women’s emancipation as constitutive of the crisis facing the white race. It further identifies the presence of an elaborate cultural narrative around white victimhood which alt-right influencers use to mainstream their ideology. To counter the perpetuation of far-right ideas in society, women’s participation in shaping far-right ideology should not remain unaddressed. This article sheds some light on how a small but highly visible group of influencers are actively working to promote a dangerous far-right ideology.

Little is known about which features of Facebook’s interface appeal to users of far-right extremist groups, how such features may influence a user’s interpretation of far-right extremist themes and narratives, and how this is being experienced across various nations. This paper looks at why certain ‘Reactions’ appealed to users in Australian and Canadian far-right groups on Facebook, and how these ‘Reactions’ may have characterized user decisions during their interaction with far-right extremist themes and narratives. A mixed methods approach has been used to conduct a cross-national comparative analysis of three years of ‘Reaction’ use across 59 Australian and Canadian far-right extremist groups on Facebook (2016–2019). The level of user engagement with administrator posts was assessed using ‘Reactions’ and identified themes and narratives that generated the most user engagement specific to six ‘Reactions’ ( ‘Love’, ‘Haha’, ‘Wow’, ‘Sad’, ‘Angry’ and ‘Thankful’). This was paired with an in-depth qualitative analysis of the themes and narratives that attracted the most user engagement specific to two popular ‘Reactions’ used over time ( ‘Angry’ and ‘Love’). Results highlight ‘Angry’ and ‘Love’ as the two most popular ‘Reactions’ assigned to in-group-out-group themes and narratives, with ‘ algorithms having propelled their partnership in these groups.

This chapter explores the intersection of white and male supremacy, both of which misrepresent women as genetically and intellectually inferior and reduce them to reproductive and/or sexual functions. The white power movement historically has been characterized by sexism and misogyny, as evidenced by the movement’s attempts to retain European heritage and maintain whiteness by policing the behavior and controlling the bodies of white women. However, the influence of white supremacist discourses on physically violent manifestations of the male supremacist movement remains largely understudied. Using supervised machine learning, we compare a corpus of violent male supremacist manifestos and other multimodal content with highly influential white nationalist texts and the manifestos of violent white supremacists to identify the shared beliefs, tropes and justifications for violence deployed within.