How Right-Wing Populists Engage with Cross-Cutting News on Online Message Boards: The Case of ForoCoches and Vox in Spain

Abstract

Anecdotal evidence suggests a link between online message boards and the rise of far-right movements, which have achieved growing electoral success globally. Press accounts and scholarship have suggested these message boards help to radicalize like-minded users through exposure to shared media insulated from cross-cutting viewpoints (e.g., Hine et al. 2017 ; Palmer 2019). To better understand what role online message boards might play for supporters of right-wing populist movements, we focus on the Spanish political party Vox and its supporters’ use of the message board ForoCoches, a fan site for car enthusiasts, which became an important platform for the party. Using more than 120,000 messages collected from threads mentioning the party between 2013–2019, we examine the URLs shared to show how mainstream news media events shape the conversation online and how users not only were exposed but deeply engaged with cross-cutting news sources. We argue that the use of sites such as ForoCoches should be viewed in the context of a broader increasingly hybrid political and media landscape where activity online and offline cannot be understood separate from one another. Moreover, our findings suggest that the online political discussions that take place in Vox-related threads on ForoCoches resemble normatively positive deliberative spaces—albeit in this case in support of illiberal political positions. In other words, our findings complicate conventional notions about the benefits of political talk, especially online, as a democratically desirable end in and of itself.

Immigrant-critical alternative media in online conversations

“…Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that legacy media content is disseminated in an environment where mainstream narratives are considered invalid, as one would expect the platform's audience to favour the resources that provide what is considered as the alternative and counter-hegemonic view of the immigration topic. Nevertheless, our conclusions confirm the earlier results that users even in similar fringe environments consume cross-cutting content, while the platforms themselves can nevertheless serve as spaces for deliberative talk [19].…”

“…Although we know that the majority of users’ messages have, in general, negative appraisals of the immigration topic, this does not exclude the possibility that users’ emotions fluctuate in the level of negativity, or that users may abide by different opinions about what the best immigration policies should be. This may leave some space for users’ deliberations, a possibility that has been suggested by the earlier research [ 19 ]. Speaking of alternative media more specifically, one may also want to explore whether immigration-related content in such resources is more controversial, and thus generating more diverse emotional responses and expressions on the forum.…”

“…When it comes to the use of alternative versus mainstream media in right-wing online environments, the existing research pointed out that, quite surprisingly, the use of and references to mainstream media sources are just as popular as those to alternative ones [ 17 , 18 ], suggesting that right-wing audiences consume different types of content despite the dominating narrative of mistrust into the established media. Thus, the research suggests, despite the circulation of illiberal or radical opinions inside fringe and echo chamber-like environments, such platforms still allow for the dissemination of cross-cutting content and can nevertheless serve as deliberative spaces [ 19 ].…”