The next speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Nicholas Corbett, whose focus is on ties between the alt-right, Gamergate, and the MAGA movement on Reddit. This entanglement has taken place for the best part of the past ten years or so, but exactly how strong are the links between these groups, and how does this manifest on Reddit’s?
This project explores a network of some 51 relevant subreddits that share a certain amount of participants. The focus here is especially on the subreddit’s core constituency: those users who participate more in the specific subreddit than in any of the others. Further, the analysis explores the extent to which these constituencies share the same bigrams (e.g. ‘white people’) in their posts.
This shows that the altright subreddit shares relatively few users in common with the Gamergate subreddit KotakuInAction, for instance, while both share substantial segments of their constituencies with TheDonald. There are also a wide range of bigrams that are distinct for each of these three major subreddits, while bigrams like ‘free speech’, ‘white male’, and ‘white people’ are common to all three, and a few others occur prominently in any two of the three.
It is also possible to examine what bigrams the different subreddits’ core constituencies contribute to each of the three major subreddits when they contribute there. This provides a more complex understanding of the themes that they introduce to these leading discussions.
Overall, then, the altright subreddit is rather distinct from the other two; all three have a common context that enables these three groups to interpenetrate each other, however, and this also provides a point of entry for alt-right perspectives to insert themselves into these communities. This has allowed the mainstreaming of such rhetoric, and this is evident also from the growing visibility of alt-right perspectives in Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.
