‘Welcome to #GabFam’: Far-right virtual community on Gab
Publikation: Beiträge in Zeitschriften › Zeitschriftenaufsätze › Forschung › begutachtet
Standard
in: New Media and Society, Jahrgang 25, Nr. 7, 01.07.2023, S. 1728-1745.
Publikation: Beiträge in Zeitschriften › Zeitschriftenaufsätze › Forschung › begutachtet
Harvard
APA
Vancouver
Bibtex
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
T1 - ‘Welcome to #GabFam’
T2 - Far-right virtual community on Gab
AU - Jasser, Greta
AU - McSwiney, Jordan
AU - Pertwee, Ed
AU - Zannettou, Savvas
N1 - © The Author(s) 2021.
PY - 2023/7/1
Y1 - 2023/7/1
N2 - With large social media platforms coming under increasing pressure to deplatform far-right users, the Alternative Technology movement (Alt-Tech) emerged as a new digital support infrastructure for the far right. We conduct a qualitative analysis of the prominent Alt-Tech platform Gab, a social networking service primarily modelled on Twitter, to assess the far-right virtual community on the platform. We find Gab’s technological affordances – including its lack of content moderation, culture of anonymity, microblogging architecture and funding model – have fostered an ideologically eclectic far-right community united by fears of persecution at the hands of ‘Big Tech’. We argue that this points to the emergence of a novel techno-social victimology as an axis of far-right virtual community, wherein shared experiences or fears of being deplatformed facilitate a coalescing of assorted far-right tendencies online.
AB - With large social media platforms coming under increasing pressure to deplatform far-right users, the Alternative Technology movement (Alt-Tech) emerged as a new digital support infrastructure for the far right. We conduct a qualitative analysis of the prominent Alt-Tech platform Gab, a social networking service primarily modelled on Twitter, to assess the far-right virtual community on the platform. We find Gab’s technological affordances – including its lack of content moderation, culture of anonymity, microblogging architecture and funding model – have fostered an ideologically eclectic far-right community united by fears of persecution at the hands of ‘Big Tech’. We argue that this points to the emergence of a novel techno-social victimology as an axis of far-right virtual community, wherein shared experiences or fears of being deplatformed facilitate a coalescing of assorted far-right tendencies online.
KW - Alt-Right
KW - Alt-Tech
KW - far right
KW - Gab
KW - platform affordances
KW - social media
KW - virtual community
KW - Politics
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85108867681&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/1e04c385-8bc8-35f9-8177-fb1ad3e3ab14/
U2 - 10.1177/14614448211024546
DO - 10.1177/14614448211024546
M3 - Journal articles
AN - SCOPUS:85108867681
VL - 25
SP - 1728
EP - 1745
JO - New Media and Society
JF - New Media and Society
SN - 1461-4448
IS - 7
ER -