Effects of Far-Right Engagement on Trust and Out-Group Antagonism

• In Event: Negative Side-Effects of Social Media: Extremism & Hate Speech

Abstract

Is interacting with far-right groups on social media enough to change our political views? In the last ten years, Americans have been troubled by the sudden salience of online far-right groups. The proliferation of far-right communities on major social media platforms has garnered a number of normative concerns about larger sociopolitical effects, including the promotion of white nationalism (Romano 2016), the normalization of hate speech against minorities and women (Southern Poverty Law Center 2018), and the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories (Zadrozny and Collins 2018; Klein and Dunn 2019), to name just a few. All of the above concerns assume that naïve social media users are at risk of being influenced by these groups and their content. Yet disentangling preexisting attitudes from learned beliefs presents a complex chicken-and-egg problem. Indeed, the term far-right describes an incredibly broad diversity of groups and belief systems. Large social media communities contain users claiming many different facets of right-wing belief systems ranging from ethnocentrism to conspiracy theories, suggesting that right-wing group members are united by a narrow set of common dislikes rather than a common ideology. Using an original dataset of posting text (N = 700,000 posts) gathered from 2,000 Reddit users between 2015 and 2017, I conduct a time-series analysis of changes in self-expression following engagement with far-right communities. I use natural language processing techniques to measure changes in attitude toward two broad categories of subjects: democratic institutions and processes (e.g. voting) and disliked out-groups (e.g. immigrants). Extending my previous work showing rapid changes in social identity expression among far-right newcomers with no history of right-wing political interests, I find that engagement with these same communities also makes newcomers more likely to discuss distrust in politicians, disengagement from the political system, and hatred of religious minorities and immigrants. I conclude with reflections on the rapid digitization of American political socialization and its consequences for the construction of social identity.

Author

• Vivian Ferrillo, Colby College