Themes of Discussion in a Far-Right Forum

The next speaker in this session at AoIR 2023 is Bharath Ganesh, whose particular focus is on the long-standing white nationalist site Stormfront. How does community work here – indeed, can it be understood as an online community or might it be better understood as a networked public?

What is important about online communities is that over time they develop, create, and codify group-specific meanings and norms; much of this is also about the constriction and maintenance of symbolic boundaries between the in- and out-groups. This may involve a diacritical (us vs. them) axis and a moral (good vs. bad) axis, which are perpendicular to each other. How can we read Stormfront through this lens?

Another key element here is that participation in Stormfront is also a very deliberate form of transgression against mainstream norms. Its participants consume and express transgressive symbols and experiences in a space where they feel able to truly express their otherwise taboo far-right identities. Some may see this as a licence to hate, and even to be physically violent, and to do so becomes a collective, ritual experience.

Bharath is exploring these practices through a large dataset of Stormfront posts from between 2000 and 2015; he explored these using a doc2vec content analysis process that clusters these posts based on their similarity in language. This produces clusters of texts which map onto a number of key spaces on the site: an opposing views forum, a Stormfront ladies forum, a politics and continuing crises forum, and a Stormfront lounge. What also emerges from this is the diacritical axis between white nationalists and their perceived enemies, and a moral axis spanning from ‘disgrace’ to ‘virtue’; these can be further explored for the key words and themes that appear in posts within the 2D matrix created by these axes.

This produces some very distinct language uses across the four quadrants of the matrix; white masculinity tends to be positioned in the virtuous in-group quadrant, while white femininity is in the disgraceful in-group quadrant; and terms relating to other races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations are in the disgraceful out-group quadrant. Some of this echoes much older rhetoric from the 1920s, too.