Suchergebnisse

It is well established that mainstream personality traits are associated with moderate, traditional political attitudes. However, very little is known regarding trait predictors of extreme political attitudes. In the current study (N = 511 U.S. residents), we examined the relationships between the Dark Triad traits, Entitlement and three extreme political attitudes that are highly covered in mainstream media: White Identitarianism ('Alt-Right'), Political Correctness-Authoritarianism, and Political Correctness-Liberalism. We found that Dark Triad traits and Entitlement had incremental validity in the prediction of these 3 attitudes over demographic factors. The Dark Triad traits and Entitlement explained a substantial portion of variance in White Identitarianism and Political Correctness-Authoritarianism, and only a small portion of variance in Political Correctness-Liberalism. Across all attitudes, Psychopathy and Entitlement were the most consistent, strongest predictors. Results indicate that, from a Dark Triad perspective, Authoritarian PC advocates have more in common with extreme right advocates than those holding PC views related to compassion.

This article suggests that one reason for the resurgence of populism we see in the digital age is its resonance as a political aesthetic with the style and aesthetics of online culture. Influencers on social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram rely on style to attract viewers and identify themselves with a community. This makes fertile ground for far-right populist movements like the alt-right, who can package extremist politics in attractive content that appears to represent viewers' everyday concerns. A growing alt-right community on YouTube known as traditional or "trad" wives create videos about femininity, beauty, and relationships. However, viewers who seek out these channels for clothing or hair styling tips leave with another kind of styling: populist messaging that frames feminism as an elitist threat to the "real" femininity of everyday women. Through rhetorical analysis, I find that trad wife vloggers' videos stylistically suture alt-right anti-feminism to the broader online influencer culture through repeated aesthetic displays of the feminine self, home, and family. I argue that this visuality acts as an aesthetic mode of veridiction for the anti-feminist message that is uniquely powerful on image-based social media platforms. It creates the appearance of broad support as similar aesthetics are repeatedly performed by many trusted influencers. I conclude by calling scholars of populism and rhetoric to attend to the way multi-layered conventions of aesthetics on social media platforms can spread extremist messaging through ambiguous content within and beyond online communities.

Over the past few years, a number of new "fringe" communities, like 4chan or certain subreddits, have gained traction on the Web at a rapid pace. However, more often than not, little is known about how they evolve or what kind of activities they attract, despite recent research has shown that they influence how false information reaches mainstream communities. This motivates the need to monitor these communities and analyze their impact on the Web's information ecosystem. In August 2016, a new social network called Gab was created as an alternative to Twitter. It positions itself as putting "people and free speech first", welcoming users banned or suspended from other social networks. In this paper, we provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first characterization of Gab. We collect and analyze 22M posts produced by 336K users between August 2016 and January 2018, finding that Gab is predominantly used for the dissemination and discussion of news and world events, and that it attracts alt-right users, conspiracy theorists, and other trolls. We also measure the prevalence of hate speech on the platform, finding it to be much higher than Twitter, but lower than 4chan's Politically Incorrect board.

This article provides a multimodal semiotic analysis of the word cuck as used in online white supremacist spaces. A fundamental belief of the white supremacist 'alt-right' movement is an anti-Semitic narrative that positions Jewish people as a 'global elite' that seeks to oppress and eliminate white populations. Central to this belief is that Jewish people actively manipulate populations of colour, Black people in particular, to overtake white populations in a process known as 'white genocide' or 'the great replacement'. Based on a digital ethnography of alt-right communities on Voat, Twitter and Reddit, this article demonstrates how the memeified word 'cuck', a pejorative term for 'weak' men on the US political right wing, draws from and reproduces this white nationalist conspiracy theory through allusions to interracial cuckold pornography. While disguised as innocuous, expressions like 'cuck' provide insight into how the alt-right weaponises misogynist and racist humour in its radicalisation efforts.

The Alt-Right increased its national profile during the 2016 presidential election based on its support of Donald Trump. This research becomes more salient with the media continuing to face similar challenges in framing far-right groups. The Alt-Right, like other Far Right groups worldwide, has moderated their framing to hide racist ideology. Therefore, the challenge of this article is to learn if the media allow newer far-right conservative groups to self-frame even against the advice from the Associated Press. This study uses qualitative framing analysis through grounded theory to review the coverage of the Alt-Right as a manner of examining if the group was successful in advancing its desired frames into mainstream media coverage. The results of this study suggest overall the Alt-Right was successful in reducing a direct discussion about the racist beliefs of the group within press coverage. This study continues in the tradition of framing studies of the past yet moves the genre forward as journalists negotiate increasing polarised and fragmented political communication.

Nagle, Angela: Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Winchester: Zero Books. 2017, 136 pages.

This paper tackles the construction of social and political values that contemporary Alt-Right politics foster. Its aim will be, first, to tackle the values that Alt-Right parties are spreading at a global scale from the last decade. Second, I will focus on how they address the most precarious social groups for increasing their supporters and how they have built a new model of the social order that gainsays human and civil rights. Finally, I will give an account of some reasons that explain the social failure of classical Leftist political parties, also attempting to transform the ways they accost the former 'working class'. I engage a dialogue with Zeynep Gambetti and Vladimir Safatle, as both authors have centrally addressed the cultural struggle that populist right parties accomplish on a global scale.

In recent years, social media platforms such as Twitter have removed users that espouse alt-right narratives of White nationalism and xenophobia from their platforms. This mass removal has caused alt-right users to migrate in droves to alternative social media sites, such as Gab. This migration reflects the "platform branding" of these social media platforms which dictates users' choices of where to migrate based on the affordances and culture of a given site. Using heterogeneous engineering, this article analyzes the contextual history, language, and technological affordances of Twitter, Reddit, and Gab. The article finds that Twitter's focus on politics and civil conversation is unhospitable to alt-right content. Reddit's somewhat neutral positioning and decentralized moderation system make alt-right content possible but unpopular. Finally, Gab provides a haven to alt-right beliefs, constructing its platform around "free speech" and alt-right extremism. Platforms embody holistic brand images through contextual, linguistic, and technological features.

Background My thesis's impetus is the rise of reactionary discourse on the internet, collectively known as the alt-right. As with the traditional right, the alt-right is anti-feminist, anti-immigration, and anti-political-correctness, but unlike its predecessor, is also anti-establishment, anti-religion, pro-Donald Trump, and thoroughly engaged with and immersed in the meme-based political discourse of digital media. Hypothesis I argue against the cyber-utopianism proposed by Douglass Rushkoff and other early internet theorists; I argue that, while the internet has made memes central to political discourse, the rise of laissez-faire social media platforms has not made the digital generation more enlightened, or tolerant, or multicultural; it has instead fostered tribalism, anti-intellectualism, and reactionary politics, manifesting in right-wing populist movements across the Western world. Methods Drawing on contemporary meme-theorists such as Ryan Milner and Whitney Philips, and citing news articles, memes, and social-media posts extensively, I argue that the internet meme-scene is a war between ideas, guided in the 2010s by far-right online meme-centers such as 4chan and Reddit. Their ideas spread via resonance through the alt-right and its various splinters, such as Gamergate, which defends "gamer identity" from the encroachment of feminism and multiculturalism. Results The mainstream media cannot understand the rise of Trump or the alt-right because they are ignorant of who produces memes, and where (i.e, 4chan and Reddit); furthermore, the media have erased their role in creating the Trump media cult of the 1980s and 90s. Conclusion The fight against the alt-right is to fight against the ignorance and misinformation encouraged by mindless repetition of memes. Keywords: Memes, 4chan, Gamergate, Reddit, Trump, critical theory, cultural studies, internet, alt-right, social media

Over the past few years, a number of new "fringe" communities, like 4chan or certain subreddits, have gained traction on the Web at a rapid pace. However, more often than not, little is known about how they evolve or what kind of activities they attract, despite recent research has shown that they influence how false information reaches mainstream communities. This motivates the need to monitor these communities and analyze their impact on the Web's information ecosystem. In August 2016, a new social network called Gab was created as an alternative to Twitter. It positions itself as putting "people and free speech first'", welcoming users banned or suspended from other social networks. In this paper, we provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first characterization of Gab. We collect and analyze 22M posts produced by 336K users between August 2016 and January 2018, finding that Gab is predominantly used for the dissemination and discussion of news and world events, and that it attracts alt-right users, conspiracy theorists, and other trolls. We also measure the prevalence of hate speech on the platform, finding it to be much higher than Twitter, but lower than 4chan's Politically Incorrect board.

Over the past few years, a number of new "fringe" communities, like 4chan or certain subreddits, have gained traction on the Web at a rapid pace. However, more often than not, little is known about how they evolve or what kind of activities they attract, despite recent research has shown that they influence how false information reaches mainstream communities. This motivates the need to monitor these communities and analyze their impact on the Web's information ecosystem. In August 2016, a new social network called Gab was created as an alternative to Twitter. It positions itself as putting "people and free speech first", welcoming users banned or suspended from other social networks. In this paper, we provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first characterization of Gab. We collect and analyze 22M posts produced by 336K users between August 2016 and January 2018, finding that Gab is predominantly used for the dissemination and discussion of news and world events, and that it attracts alt-right users, conspiracy theorists, and other trolls. We also measure the prevalence of hate speech on the platform, finding it to be much higher than Twitter, but lower than 4chan's Politically Incorrect board.