This project will investigate the role of alt-right online subcultures in the promotion and escalation of real-world violence, through comparative analysis of violent memes and discourse across both prominent and more niche chan platforms. It will consider 8chan (now offline) during the peak of violence in the summer of 2019, with current popular boards including 8kun and 4chan.
An offshoot of the far-right, the alt-right is understood as a primarily online community, which grounds its logic in the belief that certain traits are racially and biologically innate, and thus lends support to the idea of an explicitly white identity.
This project will generate an understanding of the diversity of memetic content shared between chan platforms, thereby producing new data and extending the current online radicalisation literature towards a more in-depth understanding of the online chan ecosystem.
Additionally, this project will generate a unique and unprecedented qualitative understanding of how memes may influence violent discourse between chan platforms and situate the chan ecosystem within online radicalisation literature.
Finally, this project will integrate an in-depth and multi-disciplinary understanding of the promotion of violence within the chan ecosystem into practitioners’ existing understandings of far-right online radicalisation.
Project webpage
Principal Investigator
Institution
King’s College London
People