CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Pozsar, Maria Henriete |
|---|---|
| Title | How Discourse Strengthens Online White Supremacy: Strategic Framing on Stormfront |
| Summary | Far right political violence has undoubtably been getting bolder in the United States over the past decade. One expert hypothesis is that online white supremacist spaces might contribute to this phenomenon because they may be conducive to processes of radicalization. This project aims to provide a building block for the fields of study dealing with white supremacist online radicalization by examining ideological framing processes present in an original dataset containing seventeen years of speech from the oldest online platform dedicated to white supremacy, Stormfront. In doing so, this project also aims to present an example of a mixed-methods study approach to the topic, including Natural Language Processing and Social Network Analysis, applied on the basis of social science theories from social movements and communication studies, such as framing theory, the concept of political dog-whistles and rhetorical distance. The results of the analysis come in opposition to previous findings obtained mainly from qualitative study designs which support the idea that strategic re-framing of racist and white supremacist ideas is prevalent, or at least, on the rise, in online white supremacist communities. The current findings discover that the opposite frame, dealing with racist speech and ideas in an overt, direct way, may have been underestimated, and continues to occupy an important position in the Stormfront network. |
| Supervisor | Littvay, Levente |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/pozsar_maria.pdf |
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