"It's Not Racism if it's a Fact": Dissemination of Ideological Hate in a Popular Far Right Online Forum

• In Event: Examining the Behaviors and Characteristics of Terrorists and Extremists On and Off-line

Abstract

Abstract:We examined the structure of ideological reasoning in a large corpus (1.8 million words) of written exchanges in a popular Ku Klax Klan online forum, covering political events between 2010-2014. A standardized procedure for extraction of ideological components (IELEX; Cohen et al., 2016) was used to characterize the ideology of the writers. The 2-step procedure proved efficient and sensitive in characterizing grievance-based violent ideologies. In the first step, a computational algorithm identified keywords that express absolute, fanatic and overgeneralized sentiments. In the second step, a random sample of sentences containing these words was content-analyzed for their particular ideological sub-argument by a group of 3 trained raters. Unlike most other politically violent ideologies , the KKK exchanges were notably non-specific as regards to: 1) The exact identity of their designated enemy (e.g. ’they’ was used far more than ‘blacks’, ‘immigrants’, etc.); and 2) The actions advocated to address ‘white suppression’ and its inevitably disastrous consequences. Thus, implicit calls for violent action were far more frequent than explicit ones. Along with evidence for self-censorship and disclosure aversion, the presumed function of this indirect form of ideological sedition in actual far right hate crimes will be discussed.

Authors

• Shuki Cohen, The Graduate Center, John Jay College / CUNY

• Joshua D. Freilich, The Graduate Center, John Jay College / CUNY

• Tom Holt, Michigan State University

• Steven M. Chermak, Michigan State University