Canadian right-wing extremism is now recognized as a serious problem and their use of social media to circulate hate, violence, and racism is a growing concern. However, not until circa 2016 did Canadian academics, police agencies, and intelligence agencies view the threat of right-wing extremism as a national security issue within Canada. My dissertation examines the usage of social media by “right-wing extremist”(RWE) groups in Canada to contribute to the collective knowledge pool of Canadian right-wing extremism. It aims to identify hate as an affective form of communication regularly utilized by right-wing extremists through their usages of social media. This dissertation draws upon conceptual resources in media and communication studies to develop an analytical framework to examine how four Canadian RWE Facebook pages, Pegida Canada, Act for Canada, Canada Defence League, and Canada Three Percenters, created a digital space to justify and circulate racism, hate, and violence in social media. I use social network analysis, news event analysis, and frame shift analysis to unpack the digital space that leads to what I label as “malicious enclaves”: a facade of a politically oriented group that establishes a veil of legitimacy to facilitate hateful and violence-endorsing views primarily on digital social media. The social network analysis generates an understanding of how malicious enclaves are connected and interacted with various Facebook pages, the news event analysis provides a glimpse at a two-day data inclusion window to ascertain how the malicious enclaves respond to a pre-defined news event, and finally, the frame shift analysis examines how the malicious enclaves collectively switch their frames to respond to a novel news event. My dissertation demonstrates how the online circulation of grievances around victimization has positioned racism and violence toward hated others, especially Muslims, as an RWE’s defensive response necessary to protect the nation. My research into malicious enclaves unravel an intimate relationship between social media, racist forms of hatred, and violence. Ultimately, it challenges the notion that we need only be concerned about the possibility of spillage from online to offline activity, and it encourages attention to less “spectacular” and visible forms of violence.
