Social Networks and the Challenge of Hate Disguised as Fear and Politics

This case study examines social networks as the modern intersections of radical discourse and political extremism. But, as this research will show, extremist content in social networks, even that which has telegraphed violent hate crimes, is seldom communicated in textbook forms bigotry or provocations of violence. Today, the true challenge for social networks like Facebook and Twitter is addressing hate speech that reads more like fear mongering and identity politics, and thus, does not get flagged by monitors. From accounts dedicated to inciting fear over the “threat of immigrants” or “black crime,” to groups that form around hashtags declaring that a “#whitegenocide” is underway. These narratives represent the more ubiquitous versions of hate culture that permeate these popular spaces and radicalize cultural discourses happening there. This case study explores how such rhetoric has the same capacity to deliver messages of hate, and even incite violence, by investigating six hate crimes from 2019 that were preceded by social media diatribes. The comparative analysis will show how these examples mostly featured nonviolent expressions of cultural paranoia, rather than avowals of violence or traditional hate speech, thus making them harder to detect by programs seeking out such threats in plain sight. The research then examines the user policies of leading social networks to assess whether their guidelines on hateful and violent content are purposed to address the kinds of language that were espoused by these violent extremists. The study considers the strategies being employed by social networks to expose hateful content of all forms, and the need for more prominent counter narratives

The echo chamber effect on social media

Social media may limit the exposure to diverse perspectives and favor the formation of groups of like-minded users framing and reinforcing a shared narrative, that is, echo chambers. However, the interaction paradigms among users and feed algorithms greatly vary across social media platforms. This paper explores the key dif- ferences between the main social media platforms and how they are likely to influence information spreading and echo chambers’ formation. We perform a comparative analysis of more than 100 million pieces of content concerning several controversial topics (e.g., gun control, vaccination, abortion) from Gab, Facebook, Red- dit, and Twitter. We quantify echo chambers over social media by two main ingredients: 1) homophily in the interaction networks and 2) bias in the information diffusion toward like-minded peers. Our results show that the aggregation of users in homophilic clus- ters dominate online interactions on Facebook and Twitter. We conclude the paper by directly comparing news consumption on Facebook and Reddit, finding higher segregation on Facebook.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

‘Welcome to #GabFam’: Far-right virtual community on Gab.

With large social media platforms coming under increasing pressure to deplatform far-right users, the Alternative Technology movement (Alt-Tech) emerged as a new digital support infrastructure for the far right. We conduct a qualitative analysis of the prominent Alt-Tech platform Gab, a social networking service primarily modelled on Twitter, to assess the far-right virtual community on the platform. We find Gab’s technological affordances – including its lack of content moderation, culture of anonymity, microblogging architecture and funding model – have fostered an ideologically eclectic far-right community united by fears of persecution at the hands of ‘Big Tech’. We argue that this points to the emergence of a novel techno-social victimology as an axis of far-right virtual community, wherein shared experiences or fears of being deplatformed facilitate a coalescing of assorted far-right tendencies online

How Do Individuals in a Radical Echo Chamber React to Opposing Views? Evidence from a Content Analysis of Stormfront

Calls to “break up” radical echo chambers by injecting them with alternative viewpoints are common. Yet, thus far there is little evidence about the impact of such counter-messaging. To what extent and how do individuals who inhabit a radical echo chamber engage with messages that challenge their core beliefs? Drawing on data from the radical right forum Stormfront we address this question with a large-scale content and longitudinal analysis of users’ posting behavior, which analyses more than 35,000 English language contributions to the forum spanning 2011 through 2013. Our findings show that engaging with oppositional views is actually a core practice among Stromfront users which invites active participation and encourages engagement. Indeed, many “echoes” in the echo chamber we studied were not core beliefs being restated, but the sound of opposing viewpoints being undermined and marginalized. These findings underscore the limited potential for counter-messages to undermine radical echo chambers

Fringe platforms: An analysis of contesting alternatives to the mainstream social media platforms in a platformized public sphere

Social media companies are ubiquitous in our social lives and public debate. They provide spaces for discussion and grant us access to journalism. In his 1962 Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, Jürgen Habermas described how the public sphere was transformed through the introduction of modern communication systems. With the advent of social media platforms, the public sphere has transformed again through ‘platformization’. Platformization is the process by which Big Tech companies infiltrate infrastructures, economic processes and governmental frameworks of entire public sectors, structuring them around their own practices and logics. This dissertation studies the contemporary platformized public sphere, not by focusing at the center of the public sphere, but by looking at the edges of the platform ecology, where radical or counter platform technology are situated. I do this through the concept of ‘fringe platforms’, which are defined as; alternative platform services that are established as an explicit critique of the ideological premises and practices of mainstream platform services, which strive to cause a shift in the norms of the platform ecology they contest by offering an ideologically different technology. One such platform is alt-right microblogging service Gab.com, which was subjected to a process of 'deplatformization' in 2018, when its user base was implicated in white supremacist terrorism. Deplatformization refers to tech companies’ efforts to reduce toxic content by pushing back controversial platforms and their communities to the edges of the ecosystem by denying them access to the basic infrastructural services required to function online. By studying Gab through three case studies this dissertation poses the following research questions: What is the role of fringe social media platforms in a platformized public sphere? What hierarchies and shifts in power do they signify? And how can they inform us about the platform ecosystem? In the first case study, I explore Gab as an ecosystem, and conclude that the study of fringe platforms entails a more explicit role in the analyses for a platform’s self-positioning and narrative, as well as a shift in focus from a platform as an ecosystem towards a lens that takes into account the (infra)structural consequences of a platform as part of an ecosystem of services. In the second and third case study, I oblige to this conclusion and examine Gab as part of the platform ecosystem, shifting the analytical lens to the power dynamics and infrastructures of the platformized public sphere. There, I conclude that deplatformization demonstrates how the power and influence of private technology platforms reaches far beyond their own boundaries, which reveals platform power as infrastructural and rule-setting power. In the conclusion chapter, I argue that the aforementioned fringe lens is useful, not only for the analysis of fringe platforms, but also for the platformized public sphere as a whole, as it makes the structures and infrastructures of the platformized public sphere visible; highlights power and discourse; focuses on dynamics, conflict and breakdown; and incorporates the dominant and democratically productive as well as the marginal and illiberal, in its analyses

Rückzug in die Schatten? Die Verlagerung digitaler Foren zwischen Fringe Communities und "Dark Social" und ihre Implikationen für die Extremismusprävention

Extremist:innen greifen zunehmend auf dunkle sozialen Medien zurück. Der Begriff der dunklen sozialen Medien umfasst verschiedene Typen alternativer Sozialer Medien (soziale Kontermedien wie Gab, kontextgebundene alternative Soziale Medien wie VKontakte, Fringe Communities wie 4Chan), ebenso wie verschiedene Typen dunkler Kanäle (ursprünglich private Kanäle wie Telegram und Separée-Kanäle wie geschloßene Facebook-Gruppen). Das vorliegende Gutachten beleuchtet die Gelegenheitsstrukturen für Extremismus und Extremismusprävention, die sich durch die Verlagerung hin zu dunklen Sozialen Medien ergeben. Hierfür werden in einem theoretischen Rahmenmodel Einflussfaktoren auf drei Ebenen verknüpft: (1) Regulierung (etwa durch das NetzDG) auf der gesellschaftlichen Makro-Ebene. (2) Verschiedene Genres und Typen (dunkler) sozialer Medien auf der Meso-Ebene einzelner Angebote. (3) Einstellungen, Normen und technische Affordanzen als Motivatoren menschlichen Verhaltens im Sinne der Theorie des geplanten Verhaltens (Ajzen und Fishbein, 1977) auf der Mikro-Ebene. Basierend auf diesem Rahmenmodel werden die Gelegenheitsstrukturen für Extremismus und Extremismusprävention mit Hilfe zweier Studien untersucht: (1) Einer detaillierten Plattformanalyse dunkler und etablierter Sozialer Medien (N = 19 Plattformen). (2) Eine Literaturanalyse (> ‚scoping review‘) des Forschungsstandes zu (dunklen) Sozialen Medien im Kontext von Extremismus und Extremismusprävention (N = 142 Texte). Die Ergebnisse der Platformanalyse ermöglichen nuancierte Einblicke in die Gelegenheitsstrukturen, die sich durch unterschiedliche Typen und Genres (dunkler) Sozialer Medien ergeben. Das Scoping Review bietet einen Überblick über die Entwicklung des Forschungsfeldes und die typischen Untersuchungsmethoden, die eingesetzt werden. Auf der Grundlage der erhobenen Daten werden Forschungsdesiderata und Implikationen für die Extremismusprävention diskutiert

Argumentation strategies in an online male separatist community

This thesis explores the legitimation of ‘male separatist’ ideology in an online community known as ‘Men Going Their Own Way’ (MGTOW). I take a discourse-historical approach to critical discourse studies (Reisigl and Wodak, 2016), as adapted for social media data (Unger et al., 2021), in order to examine the argumentation strategies and topoi used by members of this community to persuade others to abstain from relationships with women and reject feminism. The dataset comprises fifty threads totalling 46,000 words from the major MGTOW community hosted on Reddit. As well as contributing to a growing body of research on the manosphere, this thesis demonstrates how the DHA and topoi can be applied to social media discussion forums, where argumentation may be collaborative or expressed multimodally. Findings indicate that women were constructed as a homogenous group, meaning men must separate from all women. Arguments in favour of separatism typically relied on a topos of freedom in order to suggest that separating from women will increase men’s independence. This was often combined with a topos of finance, where increased personal freedoms included the freedom to decide how one’s money is spent and freedom from financial obligations to others. Relatedly, relationships were framed in economic terms and as a series of financial transactions, discussed in terms of the costs (to men) and benefits (to women). Furthermore, arguments against marriage used the topos of threat to construct women as a danger to men’s physical and emotional wellbeing, for example by arguing that married men risk having their lives ‘ruined’ by false claims of abuse. Arguments in opposition to feminism employed the topos of justice in order to highlight the purported the unequal treatment of men by feminists. Equality appeared to be equivalent to sameness and treating different genders in exactly the same manner, enabling commenters to delegitimise feminist activism targeting women as evidence of male oppression

Covid Conspiracy Theories in Global Perspective

Covid Conspiracy Theories in Global Perspective examines how conspiracy theories and related forms of misinformation and disinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic have circulated widely around the world. Covid conspiracy theories have attracted considerable attention from researchers, journalists, and politicians, not least because conspiracy beliefs have the potential to negatively affect adherence to public health measures. While most of this focus has been on the United States and Western Europe, this collection provides a unique global perspective on the emergence and development of conspiracy theories through a series of case studies. The chapters have been commissioned by recognized experts on area studies and conspiracy theories. The chapters present case studies on how Covid conspiracism has played out (some focused on a single country, others on regions), using a range of methods from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including history, politics, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. Collectively, the authors reveal that, although there are many narratives that have spread virally, they have been adapted for different uses and take on different meanings in local contexts. This volume makes an important contribution to the rapidly expanding field of academic conspiracy theory studies, as well as being of interest to those working in the media, regulatory agencies, and civil society organizations, who seek to better understand the problem of how and why conspiracy theories spread