Online discontent: comparing Western European far-right groups on Facebook

Klein, Ofra; Muis, Jasper

doi:10.1080/14616696.2018.1494293

Cited by 67 publications

(49 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…Third, the sample is focused on an Anglophone context and these findings do not necessarily apply to other language communities. However given similar frames of nativism and anti-liberalism in global far right communication, white thymos can be expected to be observed in other contexts, though its relative salience and specific flows are likely to be different (see Caiani and Kröll 2015, Moffitt 2017, Froio 2018, Froio and Ganesh 2019, Klein and Muis 2019.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Weaponizing white thymos: flows of rage in the online audiences of the alt-right

Ganesh

2020

Cultural Studies

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The alt-right is a growing radical right-wing network that is particularly effective at mobilizing emotion through digital communications. Introducing 'white thymos' as a framework to theorize the role of rage, anger, and indignation in alt-right communications, this study argues that emotive communication connects alt-right users and mobilizes white thymos to the benefit of populist radical right politics. By combining linguistic, computational, and interpretive techniques on data collected from Twitter, this study demonstrates that the alt-right weaponizes white thymos in three ways: visual documentation of white victimization, processes of legitimization of racialized pride, and reinforcement of the rectitude of rage and indignation. The weaponization of white thymos is then shown to be central to the culture of the alt-right and its connectivity with populist radical right politics. KEYWORDS Alt-right; populist radical right; white nationalism; social media; affect; Twitter The recent increase of research into the alt-right has uncovered much of the structure and ideology of this movement. However, how the alt-right captures the attention of its audiences and the forms of affect and emotion that it mobilizes are aspects of this movement that are not well understood. While the 'alt-right is unlike any racist movement we have ever seen. It is atomized, amorphous, predominantly online, and mostly anonymous' (Hawley 2017, p. 3), it is a product of decades of white supremacist organizing in the United States and far right ideology and narratives in Europe and North America. Moreover, the term alt-right is challenging to define, but it can be understood as an umbrella term for a set of radical right social movements active primarily (but not exclusively) in Anglophone countries. It has come to be understood in the literature as a contingent coalition of activists, usually networked online, that span online troll cultures, misogynists in the manosphere, neofascists, ultranationalists, identitarians, and white

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Weaponizing white thymos: flows of rage in the online audiences of the alt-right

Ganesh

2020

Cultural Studies

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“…This right is only attributed to particular people, based on their identity. Comparing comments on Facebook pages of right-wing parties and non-institutional groups across four European countries, Klein and Muis (2019) showed that on non-institutional pages such as the one of the GIM, anti-immigration, and anti-Islam issues were discussed frequently. Caiani and Kröll (2017) included the GIM's website and blog in their analysis of the relationship between populist (people vs. elites) and nationalist (ethno-national people vs. others) frames.…”

Section: This Study: Strategic Frames In Memesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Strategic Framing and Social Media Engagement: Analyzing Memes Posted by the German Identitarian Movement on Facebook

Guenther

Ruhrmann

Bischoff

et al. 2020

Social Media + Society

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While officially classified as a right-wing movement, the German Identitarian Movement (GIM) claims to be neither left nor right wing but rather identitarian. The social movement stands for what they call “ethno-pluralism,” communicated online without intermediate gatekeepers, in supposedly socially acceptable messages. Without a clear classification to a political wing, some Internet users encountering information created by the GIM could have difficulties assessing what this movement really stands for and what identitarian means. That is why this study examined strategic frames in a full sample of memes ( N = 511) posted by the movement on their Facebook page, because memes (here: image macros) have been the GIM’s main form of communication on Facebook. This study identified six strategic frames that represent a plurality of different social issues; some of them call for immediate action. Hence, the movement’s strategic framing goes far beyond emphasizing “ethno-pluralism.” The findings elucidate the overall communication strategies of the movement and show that the frames represent characteristics and semantics of the New Right. These frames also triggered different levels of social media engagement.

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“…We take an approach that draws on research into the social construction of imaginaries of Europe. Similar to recent work by Klein and Muis (2019) and using methods in corpusaided discourse analysis (Bayley and Williams 2012), we focus on collocations of the word Europe in tweets. Specifically, for each language, we collect all instances of the word Europe for the seed and the audience.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A “Europe des Nations”: far right imaginative geographies and the politicization of cultural crisis on Twitter in Western Europe

Ganesh

Froio

2020

Journal of European Integration

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Contestation over European integration has been widely studied in the rhetoric of parties, leaders, and movements on the far right in a variety of media. Focusing on Twitter use by far right actors in Western Europe, we apply corpus-aided discourse analysis to explore how imaginative geographies are used to politicize Europe among their digital publics. We find that the idea of a crisis of cultural identity pervades imaginaries of Europe amongst far right digital publics. While Europe is presented as facing a crisis of cultural identity, we find that the far right articulates an aspirational imaginary of Europe, the 'Europe des Nations' that rejects liberal-democratic pluralism in the EU and the 'establishment'. We find that the contestation of Europe in far right digital publics relies on a crisis of cultural identity, representing a translation of Nouvelle Droite imaginaries of Europe into the social media space.

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Online discontent: comparing Western European far-right groups on Facebook

Cited by 67 publications

References 36 publications

Weaponizing white thymos: flows of rage in the online audiences of the alt-right

Weaponizing white thymos: flows of rage in the online audiences of the alt-right

Strategic Framing and Social Media Engagement: Analyzing Memes Posted by the German Identitarian Movement on Facebook

A “Europe des Nations”: far right imaginative geographies and the politicization of cultural crisis on Twitter in Western Europe

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