Memes, Radicalisation, and the Promotion of Violence on Chan Sites

Abstract

A number of violent far-right attacks in recent years have revealed an apparent connection with `chan culture', not just in the tangible examples of attackers uploading manifestos, final messages and livestreams to chan sites themselves, but in the widespread community support exhibited in some corners of this online subculture where violence is both trivialised and glorified. Commonly, this is manifested in the visual culture present on chan sites, particularly memes, which may be used to promote extreme or even violent narratives under the guise of humour and irony. This paper seeks to understand how the visual culture of chan sites contribute to, and/or encourage violent discourse. In particular, we combine quantitative data scraping, ethnography and visual analysis across tens of chan sites ranging in popularity like 4chan, 8kun, or neinchan between March -- June 2020. Over all we collect a dataset of 135K images across different chans and provide first qualitivative characterization of the most popular images shared across different chans.

‘Nothing Can Stop What’s Coming’: An analysis of the conspiracy theory discourse on 4chan’s /Pol board

“…The other posts containing triple parentheses more or less follow the same thematic direction: an antagonistic expression of antisemitism hidden in plain sight yet directed at the media, Jews themselves included above as (((they))), and a conspiratorial treatment of the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers Crawford et al (2020: 4) found that ‘[g]lobal instability relating to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the reignited Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 became a focal point for racist, anti-Semitic, and misogynistic narratives online, which played heavily into the visual culture on the chans’. Such narratives helped to further express desires for an accelerationist race war or similar to take root in the United States.…”

“…For example, previous research demonstrates how 4chan users deploy novel expressions designed to avoid basic comprehension from possible outsiders. Specifically, 4chan users actively cultivate an ‘’in-group’ status that is so critical in fostering an extremist mindset, partially due to the visual culture present on chans which obfuscates extremist messaging to less-familiar observers’ (Crawford et al, 2020: 4).…”

‘We the people, not the sheeple’: QAnon and the transnational mobilisation of millennialist far-right conspiracy theories

“…This suggests emerging scholarship must consider the role that QAnon plays in digitally locating adherents amongst extreme right discourse, such as antisemitic conspiracy theories, and the risks that this poses for potential radicalisation. Existing scholarship has explored the role that conspiracy theories have played in extreme right radicalisation (Crawford, et al, 2021), however, QAnon has not always been considered and, as this study has demonstrated, it needs to be. Jewish people were not the only marginalised group to be targeted.…”

“…While COVID-19 conspiracy theories were also prominent on 8kun, the most prevalent additional conspiracy theories were antisemitic. Antisemitism is present in Australian far-right discourse Richards, 2019) and antisemitic conspiracy theories are used by the extreme right to justify targeting Jewish people (Crawford, et al, 2021). Holocaust denialism, Jewish control of the government, business and the media, as well as white genocide and the great replacement, were all present on 8kun.…”

The Reddit Politosphere: A Large-Scale Text and Network Resource of Online Political Discourse

“…Social media platforms have become a key resource for research on political participation and discourse (see Haq et al (2020) and Theocharis and Jungherr (2021) for overviews). Studies have investigated a wide range of phenomena including political polarization (Adamic and Glance 2005;Conover et al 2011;Himelboim, McCreery, and Smith 2013;Weber, Garimella, and Batayneh 2013;Garcia et al 2015;Garimella et al 2018;Morales et al 2019), ideological radicalization (Grover and Mark 2019;Crawford, Keen, and Suarez-Tangil 2021;Mamié, Ribeiro, and West 2021), and political framing (Demszky et al 2019;Mendelsohn, Budak, and Jurgens 2021;Reiter-Haas, Kopeinik, and Lex 2021). Since many subreddits are political discussion groups (e.g., r/politics), sometimes even with explicit ideological orientation (e.g., r/Conservative, r/Liberal), Reddit has become a particularly popular resource for studies on online political discourse (Nithyanand, Schaffner, and Gill 2017;An et al 2019;Grover and Mark 2019;Guimaraes et al 2019;Soliman, Hafer, and Lemmerich 2019;Marchal 2020;Rajadesingan, Resnick, and Budak 2020;Waller and Anderson 2021).…”