- Maja Brandt Andreasen, University of Stavanger: Race, gender, and sexuality in right-wing extremist memes
- Øyvind B. Solheim, Institute for Social Research & Anders Ravik Jupskås, C-REX, University of Oslo: Fear, anger, and the Scandinavian far right
- Henriette Frees Esholdt, Lund University: The secret weapon of terrorism: Emotive narratives in disinformation campaigns against Sweden to incite Islamist extremist milieus to mobilize
Abstracts
Race, gender, and sexuality in right-wing extremist memes
Maja Brandt Andreasen, University of Stavanger
The paper presents initial findings from a research project that looks at Internet memes and other visual post in right-wing extremist digital spaces in Scandinavia. Internet memes have become a popular means of communication online. As they lend themselves particularly well as a shorthand for racial stereotypes, memes are circulated on right-wing extremist platforms where they reproduce discourses of racism that is layered in irony and sarcasm, and often hidden under the guise of humour.
This paper investigates the construction of race, sexuality, and gender across three right-wing extremist platforms – one in each of the Scandinavian countries. Considering how not only race but also sexuality and gender are discursively constructed, the paper investigates how right-wing extremist memes construct the white, heterosexual man as the Scandinavian norm and ideal while ‘othering’ racial, sexual, and gender minorities.
In a discursive space where hate and humour coexist, extremist violent discourse might be trivialised and considered “just a joke”. The paper, however, makes a point of taking humour seriously in order to identify how humour becomes harmful within violent extremist discourse.
Fear, anger, and the Scandinavian far right
Øyvind Bugge Solheim, Institute for Social Research, Anders Ravik Jupskås, C-REX, University of Oslo & Amandine Toso
Emotional reactions to societal change have long been seen as important for the mobilization of the far right. While some research has seen fear as the main driver for far-right and anti-islamic mobilization (Ekman 2015, Wodak 2015), recent contributions have argued that anger is the driving force of far-right support (Vasilopoulos et al. 2018). Anger has also been found to be crucial to both engagement in online debates and to the creation of online echo chambers (Wollebæk et al. 2019). This paper contributes to this research by going beyond survey data and directly studying the emotional content of the posts in prominent Scandinavian far-right Facebook groups. Sentiment analysis is used to identify the emotional content of one year worth of posts of multiple groups in each country. This is used to investigate the multitude of emotional reactions in the far-right mobilization, not only fear and anger (Lesser and Spissinger 2020). The emotional content of the posts is in turn used to investigate to what extent the different types of emotion lead to differences in mobilization and engagement online.
The secret weapon of terrorism: Emotive narratives in disinformation campaigns against Sweden to incite Islamist extremist milieus to mobilize
Henriette Frees Esholdt, University of Gothenburg
The latest assessment of the threats against Sweden shows that the broader threat to democracy is becoming increasingly prominent, as (violent) Islamist extremists in various subversive ways such as the spread of disinformation on social media work to increase division in society to overturn Swedish society and democracy. In recent years we have seen several disinformation campaigns targeting Sweden to incite Islamist extremist milieus to mobilize: 1) the LVU-campaign in 2021-2022, 2) the campaign following the Swedish Qur’an burnings in 2023, and 3) the campaign in connection with the Swedish Prime Minister’s statement on a meeting regarding the Israel and Hamas conflict in 2023. The campaigns resulted in demonstrations and protests (online and offline) characterized by heightened emotions. Based on an open social media study of accounts on mainstream social media belonging to central actors, groups and organizations propagating radical Islam and disseminating content relating to the recent disinformation campaigns against Sweden, this paper explores the emotive narratives in the campaigns deployed to incite Islamist extremist milieus to mobilize. The paper draws on literature on radical Islam in different Islamist extremist movements (both violent and non-violent) describing their religious/ideological worldview, as well as insights from cultural criminology and narrative criminology.