This panel represents a cross-section of the research being conducted by scholars from Uppsala and Umeå University who are currently collaborating on a Swedish Research Council funded project entitled: Angry White Men? A Study of Violent Racism, Correlations between Organized and Unorganized Hate Crime and the Affective Dimensions of Ultranationalism. Directed towards different groups of actors (including political organizations, far-right movements and a social media using public), moments in time (from the early twentieth century until today), media forms (including literature, artwork, campaign films, Facebook posts and tweets) the panel’s individual papers explore racism and terror with respect to various theories, methods and scales of analysis.
Paper presenters:
- Heléne Lööw: “Back to Basics in a Digital World: The Return of Traditional Fascist Ideology and Organizations”
- Samuel Merill and Mathilda Åkerlund: “Standing up for Sweden? The architectures and affordances of racism in a Swedish anti-immigrant Facebook group”
- Mathilda Åkerlund: Influential users in far-right anti-immigration discourse on Twitter
- Simon Lindgren: “The temporality of #terrorattacks: Co-articulation, meaning-making and the reiteration of hashtags”
Abstracts
Back to Basics in a Digital World: The Return of Traditional Fascist Ideology and Organizations
Heléne Lööw, Department of History, Uppsala University.
The paper addresses the return in recent years to more traditional Nordic national socialist and fascist ideas, such as the dream of creating a Nordic national socialist state and the idea of the existence of a “Nordic racial soul”. The Nordic Resistance Movement with subchapters in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland and Finland, is the latest attempt to create a Nordic Version of national socialism and a unified Nordic movement with independent country specific subchapters. This paper explores the historical roots and the present manifestations of these ideas. It also examines the organizational set up of the Nordic Resistance Movement and its tactical use of actual and threatened violence. The paper will also address the question of how old tactics have been brought into our contemporary digital world.
Influential users in far-right anti-immigration discourse on Twitter
Mathilda Åkerlund, Digital Social Research Unit (DIGSUM), Umeå University.
Numerous studies have provided valuable insight into the workings of far-right groups online. However, while it is well-known that small numbers of users often produce large shares of user-generated content online, much research into far-right social media discourse has tended to focus on groups or collectives, disregarding the role of individual, influential users. Using a mixed-methods approach of descriptive statistics, sentiment analysis and discourse analysis, this paper studies far-right anti-immigration discourse on Twitter to understand whether, or to what extent influential users can be identified in a far-right anti-immigration discourse, and how these users distinguish themselves through their activity and language use.
Standing Up for Sweden? The Architectures and Affordances of Racism in a Swedish Anti-Immigrant Facebook Group
Samuel Merrill and Mathilda Åkerlund, Digital Social Research Unit (DIGSUM), Umeå University.
Facebook has faced growing criticism regarding its handling of hateful user-generated content (UGC) with research revealing how the platform can foster both covert and overt racism. This research has tended to focus on racist content while relying on abstract references to social media’s general logics. In this paper we consider how Facebook shapes the production of racism in more concrete ways through its architectures and affordances. To do this we use a large Swedish immigration-focussed Facebook group as a case study and combine a quantitative topic modelling of a large data-set of the group’s UGC with a qualitative critical discourse analysis of a targeted sample of that data-set. Our findings show how Facebook enables and influences various discursive strategies of identification and persuasion - within which covert and overt racist discourses are embedded – through processes of cybertyping, role-playing, crowdsourcing and (counter-)reaction. In order to emphasise connections with the Conference theme we illustrate our arguments where possible with respect to examples of violent far-right extremism
The Temporality of #Terrorattacks: Co-articulation, Meaning-making and the Reiteration of Hashtags
Simon Lindgren, Digital Social Research Unit (DIGSUM), Umeå University.
Twitter has been frequently discussed in relation to its role as potential tool for terrorist recruitment, mobilisation and coordination. This study is more interested in how it is used by victims and the general public for making sense of, and remembering, the attacks. Tweets often focus their attention not only on the attack at hand, but also simultaneously on previous attacks. Thus, Twitter reactions to terror attacks express a referential system where the events become discursively connected to one another. In this study, I am interested in how attack hashtags are co-occurring in tweets over time, and the ways in which the tweets contribute to discursively co-articulate the terror attacks. I analyze how such symbolic relationships are established, through the concurrent use on Twitter of two or more event hashtags relating to twelve terror attacks in France (3), Turkey (2), Belgium (1), Germany (1), Sweden (1), UK (3), and Spain (1) between 2015-2017. I ask to what extent, and how, the identified patterns suggest discursive relationships that either bridge, amplify, extend, or transform the individual or initial uses and meanings of the hashtags.