{"title":"More Than Meets the Reply: Examining Emotional Belonging in Far-Right Social Media Space","authors":"Jonathan Collins","doi":"10.1177/20563051241274665","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This article challenges prevailing assumptions that fringe social media platforms predominantly serve as unmoderated hate-filled spaces for far-right communication by examining the userbase’s emotional connection to these environments. Focusing on Gab Social, a popular alternative technology website with affordances akin to Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, and its subgroup, “Introduce Yourself,” the research investigates how participants discuss their attachment and sense of membership within a far-right online community. Employing a constructivist grounded theory approach and a thick data mixed-methods technique encompassing netnography and sentiment analysis, I uncover the complex and impassioned narratives underlying users’ sense of emotional belonging on the platform. The resulting findings demonstrate how counter-mainstream media act as a unifying force by catering to the social needs of participants seeking an in-group of like-minded individuals. Moreover, I argue that fringe social media platforms offer participants far more than mainstream platforms, providing a positive interactive environment and a new virtual home for those feeling rejected and antagonized by other communities, institutions, and organizations, both online and offline. Therefore, the work offers valuable empirical insights into the emotional emphasis participants place on fringe social media and its implications for fostering attachment, community formation, and identity construction within far-right online counterpublics.","PeriodicalId":47920,"journal":{"name":"Social Media + Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.5000,"publicationDate":"2024-08-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Social Media + Society","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051241274665","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This article challenges prevailing assumptions that fringe social media platforms predominantly serve as unmoderated hate-filled spaces for far-right communication by examining the userbase’s emotional connection to these environments. Focusing on Gab Social, a popular alternative technology website with affordances akin to Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, and its subgroup, “Introduce Yourself,” the research investigates how participants discuss their attachment and sense of membership within a far-right online community. Employing a constructivist grounded theory approach and a thick data mixed-methods technique encompassing netnography and sentiment analysis, I uncover the complex and impassioned narratives underlying users’ sense of emotional belonging on the platform. The resulting findings demonstrate how counter-mainstream media act as a unifying force by catering to the social needs of participants seeking an in-group of like-minded individuals. Moreover, I argue that fringe social media platforms offer participants far more than mainstream platforms, providing a positive interactive environment and a new virtual home for those feeling rejected and antagonized by other communities, institutions, and organizations, both online and offline. Therefore, the work offers valuable empirical insights into the emotional emphasis participants place on fringe social media and its implications for fostering attachment, community formation, and identity construction within far-right online counterpublics.
期刊介绍:
Social Media + Society is an open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal that focuses on the socio-cultural, political, psychological, historical, economic, legal and policy dimensions of social media in societies past, contemporary and future. We publish interdisciplinary work that draws from the social sciences, humanities and computational social sciences, reaches out to the arts and natural sciences, and we endorse mixed methods and methodologies. The journal is open to a diversity of theoretic paradigms and methodologies. The editorial vision of Social Media + Society draws inspiration from research on social media to outline a field of study poised to reflexively grow as social technologies evolve. We foster the open access of sharing of research on the social properties of media, as they manifest themselves through the uses people make of networked platforms past and present, digital and non. The journal presents a collaborative, open, and shared space, dedicated exclusively to the study of social media and their implications for societies. It facilitates state-of-the-art research on cutting-edge trends and allows scholars to focus and track trends specific to this field of study.