- Olivier Peria, EHESS & C-REX, University of Oslo: Avoiding censorship while building a far-right subcultural identity. Insights from the French 4chan
- Katri-Maaria Kyllönen, University of Jyväskylä: Travelling concepts – tracing narrative travels from political discourse to right-wing online communities
- Ali Unlu, Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare & Tommi Kotonen, University of Jyväskylä: Analyzing the interplay of hate speech and political dynamics in Finnish Twitter networks
Abstracts
Avoiding censorship while building a far-right subcultural identity. Insights from the French 4chan.
Olivier Peria, EHESS & C-REX, University of Oslo
How do a French far-right online community circumvent content moderation and censorship from the forum’s website it originated from and how does this contribute to its sub-cultural identity-building?
Through data (mostly screenshots of online discussions) collected from a lengthy digital ethnography, I will discuss three ways that allow the community to avoid their posts being censored. First, the use of slangs to refer to target groups instead of using overt hate-speech, tends to thwart automatic keyword (and to a lesser extent, human) moderation. Second, they use a browser add-on which permits them to be redirected to an archiving webpage and reach content that had been suppressed by the platform. Finally, they’re able to “migrate” to other, related but less regulated forums that explicitly allow extreme opinions to be expressed.
As a conclusion, I will discuss how knowledge of these practices and techniques for avoiding censorship is perceived as a “subcultural capital” that contributes to identity-building and boundary-making both inside and outside the forums users’ communities.
Travelling concepts – tracing narrative travels from political discourse to right-wing online communities
Katri-Maaria Kyllönen, University of Jyväskylä
During his presidency, Donald Trump endorsed and disseminated content circulating among alt-right online subcultures while publicly refusing to condemn far-right-motivated acts of violence, thereby signalling his alignment with the ideology. The U.S. Capitol attack serves as an example of how manipulative narratives were used to orchestrate a loosely organised political movement, which mainly existed in the online sphere, into a concrete takeover attempt. This study applies Mieke Bal’s theorisation of "travelling concepts" to examine how themes, concepts, and metaphors travel between political discourse and online communities.
Following a thematic, qualitative analysis of the first dataset consisting of Trump’s tweets between the U.S. presidential election in late 2020 and the Capitol Hill attack, we will employ an unsupervised text classification model to systematically identify and categorise key narratives within the second, Truth Social dataset. We compare the outcomes to assess the extent of correspondence between our automated text classification and the insights gained through manual, qualitative methods. Our research sheds light on the dynamics between political discourse and online subcultures, emphasizing the role of online communities as a factor in extremist violence.
Analyzing the interplay of hate speech and political dynamics in Finnish Twitter networks
Ali Unlu, Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare & Tommi Kotonen, University of Jyväskylä
This research provides an in-depth analysis of the influence of X (former Twitter) as a platform for political engagement and the proliferation of hate speech in Finland. The study's timeframe spans from 2018 to 2023, focusing on the online discourse targeting Muslims and LGBTQ+ communities. It particularly scrutinizes the activities of Finnish parliamentarians within these networks. By employing Agenda-Setting Theory, the research investigates how hate speech networks on Twitter interact with political participation and influence the public agenda on X. Our methodology involves computational text analysis and network analysis to dissect the structure and content of these digital communities. We highlight the prevalence of divisive narratives, noting a significant correlation with far-right political factions. The analysis reveals how these digital echo chambers not only perpetuate hate speech but also actively shape political discourse, thereby influencing societal norms and policy agendas. Crucially, this study contributes to the understanding of the mechanisms through which online platforms can foster hate speech and extremist ideologies. It also discusses the broader implications of these findings for public policy and democratic processes in Finland, offering valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities for countering violent extremism in the Nordic context.