‘Welcome to #GabFam’: Far-right virtual community on Gab
Research output: Journal contributions › Journal articles › Research › peer-review
Authors
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.
Original language | English |
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Journal | New Media and Society |
Volume | 25 |
Issue number | 7 |
Pages (from-to) | 1728-1745 |
Number of pages | 18 |
ISSN | 1461-4448 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 01.07.2023 |
Bibliographical note
© The Author(s) 2021.
- Alt-Right, Alt-Tech, far right, Gab, platform affordances, social media, virtual community
- Politics