The next speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Antonia Vaughan, whose focus is on how we as academics can research the far right while minimising potential harms. This has been problematised by the neoliberal turn in academia, where precarity is the norm and critical research may be disincentivised. This promotes neoliberal ideas of academic individualism, encapsulated in the phrase ‘publish or perish’, or perhaps now ‘publish and perish’. Attention on articles has been increasingly metricised, including also via altmetrics that allow for connections and visibility in the public sphere outside of traditional academic spaces. This also valorises academic social …

Up next in this AoIR 2022 session is my temporary University of Zürich colleague Daniela Mahl, whose focus is on conspiracy theories. The culture of such conspiracy theories has changed recently: they are more visible and circulate more quickly now, and new and unique subcultures have emerged that engage with them. The logics and connectivity of digital platforms are important drivers of these developments.

This has resulted in the platforming of racism and antisemitism, for instance, and in the emergence of platformed conspiracism. This emerges from the confluence of the specificities of the platforms themselves, and the emergent practices of …

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 …

It’s Wednesday, I think, so I’m in Dublin for the first face-to-face AoIR conference since AoIR 2019 in Brisbane. It’s genuinely delightful to be amongst this wonderful community again at last. As usual, the conference starts with the conference keynote by Nanjala Nyabola, addressing the conference theme of Decolonising the Internet. She begins by noting that the vast majority of people experience the Internet in a foreign tongue; and it is appropriate to address this issue in Ireland, which has had its own history of having its national identity and language suppressed for so long.

Nanjala’s keynote is based on …

After the excitement of the ECREA 2022 conference proper, my colleagues Sofya Glazunova, Dan Angus and I attended a further post-conference on Digital Media and Information Disorders that was organised by the excellent Anja Bechmann and her team, where we presented a number of papers.

First, Dan presented a paper on behalf of first author Edward Hurcombe on the way that Facebook’s owner Meta shapes the public perception of mis- and disinformation through its statements via the Facebook Newsroom, the platform’s main public relations outlet:

The final speaker in this last ECREA 2022 session is Tiago Lapa, whose focus is on the far right in Portugal and Spain. Until a few years ago, these countries had no major far-right parties, but the Catalan independence struggle led to the emergence of Vox as a successful far-right party in Spain in 2017, and Chega followed in Portugal a couple of years later.

Tiago examined the views of these parties as expressed on their Facebook pages from December 2021 (Vox) and September 2022 (Chega). Cheka’s main narratives have a strong anti-establishment tone, attacking the entire political system, conducting …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is Judith Goetz, whose focus is on the Austrian Identitarian movement. This movement has been an effort to restore far-right language and and ideas into German-language discourse, not least by exploiting certain weaknesses and opportunities in centre-right discourses. This has pushed the boundaries of what can be said with impunity further and further to the right, and has established far-right views in the mainstream media and everyday life.

The Identitarians are a typical example of these developments, and Judith has analysed their discourses by drawing on the material published on their own …

It’s the final session at ECREA 2022 already, and what an excellent conference it’s been – so good to be back away from Zoom and amongst the people. This final session is on the extreme right, and begins with a paper by Bart Cammaerts on the appropriation and normalisation of fascist, extreme-right discourses by more mainstream right-wing politicians. In the process, struggles for social justice are being abnormalised in turn.

Such normalisation involves a demand side and a supply side: on the demand side, the increasing tensions arising from financial globalisation, cultural diversity, democratic deficits, and entrenched inequalities; on the …

The final keynote speaker at ECREA 2022 this week is Gary Younge, a former editor-at-large for The Guardian. He begins by playing a promotional video from his exploration of whiteness in America, from his perspective as a black man from the UK, which intended to flip the script on white journalists’ explorations of black lives in the US or UK. The clip went viral and Gary has kept getting recognised for it, even if the full documentary was perhaps not watched anywhere near as often.

The clip, unfortunately, reduced racism to a spectacle, and after a lifetime of teasing …