The alt-right was not all right: examining the alt-right's boundaries and appeal among millions of Redditors between 2014 to 2017

Abstract

As the alt-right emerged in the circumstances of the mid-2010s, discussion of this moment often referred to the ever-expanding mass of social media users turning toward the extremism of the alt-right and adjacent reactionary phenomena in a critical challenge to liberal democracies. On a platform like Reddit, where individuals can engage with others regarding one or more of their interests at large scales of activity, research suggested that Redditors proved hospitable, sympathetic and engaged with the alt-right as an extremist phenomenon. But the problem is that the amorphousness of the alt-right, where it is unclear where and among whom it begins and ends as an extremist identifier, makes any such generalised attribution across huge swathes of Redditors difficult to justify. It is necessary to undertake granular empirical analysis of the alt-right on Reddit to delineate the alt-right for the significant phenomenon that it actually was.

This thesis examines a network of Reddit activity between 2014 and 2017 in order to both distinguish alt-right Redditors from those not and to find how the two relate to each other in the circumstances of those years. 51 subreddits have been identified that constitute various phenomena and also express common engagement with content from reputed alt-right websites and blogs. Through social network analysis, each subreddit has been networked to the others to the extent that Redditors mutually undertake activity in each. This allows the analysis to narrow the alt-right's constituency to a specific subset of Redditors engaging in certain subreddits, while also enabling an examination of how this constituency engages with the activity and constituencies for other phenomena (including Gamergate, MAGA and manosphere subreddits) in these subreddit networks. These networks illustrate not only the choices that certain Redditors make to engage (or not) in extremism, but also how such activity appeals to or repels the overall swathe of Redditors found among the 51 subreddits.

This thesis argues that the alt-right existed at the periphery of a broader reactionary discontent occurring in the subreddit networks. At a time when Gamergate and MAGA were bringing identity politics to the fore of political discourse, alt-right Redditors in subreddits like altright and new_right traded on such circumstances to contextualise its virulently anti-Semitic and white nationalist ideology and to justify the phenomenon as the solution to the overall decline of white society. But the flip-side to such modestly-scaled activity is that very few Redditors in other subreddits, like The_Donald or KotakuInAction, chose to contemporaneously engage with either the alt-right itself or the specifics of its ideology. Third-party discussion of the alt-right was often sceptical to outright hostile. Rather than showing a significant relationship between Redditors and extremism, the alt-right's modest Reddit presence demonstrates the disinclination of Redditors generally to engaging with virulent extremism. At a time of heightened relevance for the alt-right, Redditor's users proved a hindrance to the influence of the alt-right. Show more