Reclaiming Alternative Social Media from the Alt-Right

It’s the first day proper of the first proper in-person AoIR conference since Brisbane 2019, and I’m starting with a session on hate speech. It starts with Robert Gehl, who points out how all alternative social media is being reduced to right-wing social media – this ignores other forms of alternative, citizens’ social media, and even studies by reputable centres like the Pew Research Center are guilty of such oversimplification. Alternative social media is much bigger than just a handful of fascist sites.

This is exemplified for instance by the Fediverse, a network of alternative social media sites that run on the shared ActivityPub protocol and actively pushes back against right-wing and fascist social media sites. Why are such initiatives ignored by major studies? Robert suggests that this is because these studies tend to begin from a concern about the alt-right, import existing social media methods to the study of al-right, and focus mainly on deplatforming and surveillance capitalism.

This is not to say that the fascist alternative social media should not be studied, of course; there are legitimate concerns here. And they are also quite recognisable to existing scholarship and methodological approaches, because they largely operate like conventional social media platforms; they are centralised, have considerable scale, feature prominent accounts with many followers, and are publicly accessible. These methods would find it a lot more difficult to study the Fediverse, for instance: it is comprised of thousands of very small sites with an aggregate membership in the millions. Finally, there is a strong scholarly interest in the processes of deplatforming problematic influencers, and the alternative alt-right platforms provide a space for influencers who have been deplatformed from mainstream social media platforms and therefore attract scholarly attention.

An alternative perspective here is one which focusses on citizens’ social media: democratically run platforms as they exist in the Fediverse. It is interesting to note how the Fediverse dealt with the fascist platform Gab, which sought to fork the Mastodon code (which some Fediverse sites run on) in order to create an outright fascist federated network of sites. Fediverse coordinators fought this successfully by isolating and excluding Gab from the network, and this demonstrates an approach for combatting such sites.