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) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/S011528/1).

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 -