Between Everyday Racism and Conspiracy Theories

Abstract

Before the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik committed his attacks on 22 July 2011 in Oslo and on the island of Utøya, which left 77 people dead, he uploaded a manifesto of more than 1,500 pages onto the Internet and simultaneously sent it by email to more than 1,000 recipients. He thereby spread his worldview, which was greatly marked by his hatred of Islam and Muslims. The manifesto consists largely of extensive excerpts from internationally based anti-Muslim websites. Although Breivik's terror attacks are certainly an extreme case, it has been observed over the past few years that the World Wide Web plays a significant role in disseminating the sort of anti-Muslim thought that the perpetrator invoked.1 This also applies to mobilizing people in person, as the protest movement Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident, known by its German acronym PEGIDA [Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West], which started in Dresden in October 2014, demonstrates. The group recruited its supporters primarily through social networks such as Facebook, and was able to put up to 25,000 demonstrators in the street.2Statements against Muslims ranging from the discriminatory to the openly hateful have been expressed in diverse political milieus. On extreme right-wing websites, such as that of the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), Muslims are attacked as the quintessence of the "other" and the epitome of the "foreigner." These extremists are to be distinguished from Islamophobic groups who offer a different justification of their similar attitudes toward Muslims in Europe. In contrast to right-wing extremists, they take an explicitly philo semitic and pro-American stance and pretend to approve of democracy and human rights. My article focuses on such groups, which can be classified

Conspiracy Theories and White Supremacy on YouTube: Exploring Affiliation and Legitimation Strategies in YouTube Comments

“…YouTube appears particularly amenable to platforming conspiracies and misinformation (Röchert et al, 2022). These are discursive practices that have also been closely linked to xenophobic discourses, such as islamophobia (Farkas et al, 2018; Shooman, 2016) and antisemitism (Allington et al, 2021). Previous qualitative research into deceptive content on YouTube, has explored right-wing extremist communities (Ekman, 2014; Levy, 2020; Lewis, 2018), racist influencers (Johns, 2017; Murthy & Sharma, 2019), populist YouTubers (Finlayson, 2020; Zuk & Zuk, 2020), and conspiracy videos (Allington & Joshi, 2020; Mohammed, 2019; Paolillo, 2018).…”

Memeing a conspiracy theory: On the biopolitical compression of the great replacement conspiracy theories

“…Scholarly inquires have also put forward an argument that links the rise of PRCT with the strengthening and the expansion of far-right ideologies into mainstream politics (Ashbee, 2019; Bangstad, 2019; Bergmann, 2018; Camus, 2019; Sedwick, 2019), but significantly as well as key components in the identity work of far-right groups and organizations such as PEGIDA (Keskinkilic, 2016; Shooman, 2016), and Generation Identity (Zúquete, 2018). We also know that PRCT have found a prolific niche to reproduce and expand on the internet (Davey and Ebner, 2019; Ebner, 2019), and that they have also become a point of encounter between different fractions and position within the sometimes competing right and far-right political spectrum (Bogerts and Fielitz, 2019; May and Feldman, 2018).…”

Anti-migrant Islamophobia in Europe. Social roots, mechanisms and actors

“…These well connected organisations form a network which plays an important role in spreading the key themes of Islamophobia, in particular acting as a transmission belt from theoretical racism to popular racism. The influence of these groups is partly due to their strong presence on the internet and partly to a powerful use of social media, and to online activism, which results in an intense virulence of virtual Islamophobia (Chao, 2015;Shooman, 2016).…”