Assessing the Extent and Types of Hate Speech in Fringe Communities: A Case Study of Alt-Right Communities on 8chan, 4chan, and Reddit

Assessing the Extent and Types of Hate Speech in Fringe Communities: A Case Study of Alt-Right Communities on 8chan, 4chan, and Reddit

Recent right-wing extremist terrorists were active in online fringe communities connected to the alt-right movement. Although these are commonly considered as distinctly hateful, racist, and misogynistic, the prevalence of hate speech in these communities has not been comprehensively investigated ye...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social media + society Vol. 7; no. 4
Main Authors: Rieger, Diana, Kümpel, Anna Sophie, Wich, Maximilian, Kiening, Toni, Groh, Georg
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01-10-2021
Sage Publications Ltd
SAGE Publishing
Subjects:
Case studies
Community
Content analysis
Hate speech
Racism
Right wing politics
Terrorists
White supremacy
content analysis
Reddit
alt-right
8chan
topic modeling
hate speech
fringe communities
4chan
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Summary:Recent right-wing extremist terrorists were active in online fringe communities connected to the alt-right movement. Although these are commonly considered as distinctly hateful, racist, and misogynistic, the prevalence of hate speech in these communities has not been comprehensively investigated yet, particularly regarding more implicit and covert forms of hate. This study exploratively investigates the extent, nature, and clusters of different forms of hate speech in political fringe communities on Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan. To do so, a manual quantitative content analysis of user comments (N = 6,000) was combined with an automated topic modeling approach. The findings of the study not only show that hate is prevalent in all three communities (24% of comments contained explicit or implicit hate speech), but also provide insights into common types of hate speech expression, targets, and differences between the studied communities.
ISSN:2056-3051
2056-3051
DOI:10.1177/20563051211052906