Strategic ambiguity is as much an indicator of far right influences as any of these references. Gift link.

Well, this is terrifying.

Il est souvent utile de lire une perspective étrangère sur tout ce qui se passe actuellement aux États-Unis, même quand ça me déprime.

Nick Fuentes is trouble.

Don’t need the NYTimes to say this to recognize that it’s happening, but it’s helpful to have all of these examples gathered in a single place. Gift link.

Some wild details in here—all of which seem more important to me than the application details.

Le décryptage des communautés en ligne a toujour été un genre important des recherches, mais c’est surtout important dans des cas comme celui-ci.

Oof. Not great.

I’m pleased to be able to finally share the publication in the British Journal of Educational Technology of an article that Dan Krutka and I have been working on for some time, which documents activity in a teachers’ group on a far-right social media platform (which we intentionally don’t identify within the paper). Here’s a link to a full-text, read-only version of the article, and here’s the abstract as a preview:

Acknowledging the ambiguity in Musk’s salute is important: not to let him off the hook, but to recognize how much more dangerous things are when they’re ambiguous than when they’re straightforward.

Bookmarking for… sigh… teaching purposes.

Taking cues from neo-Nazis is a great look for the GOP ticket.

Quelle honte !

This is just a few words to say that this post that I wrote back in December 2022 has suddenly become relevant.

In short, some of my recent work has been on an online Mormon community that has some overlaps with the far-right. In between my collection of the data and eventual publication of our various articles, my co-author and I have noted some prominent accounts’ being suspended from Twitter. Because we work hard to not use identifiable quotes in our writing, and because of Elon Musk’s decision to unsuspend nearly all suspended accounts after taking the platform over, I’ve been checking accounts I knew to previously be suspended as we work on a new manuscript. Today, for the first time, I’ve found one account that has indeed been unsuspended.

Kicked off the family holiday gathering by watching this with my dad last night. This was a good Indiana Jones movie, I (mostly) had fun watching it, and I’m probably being a little harsh in my rating of it.

However, for all we live in an era where punching Nazis is shorthand for some very necessary resistance to some very dangerous far-right action, I’ve been reading about non-violence lately, and that makes it hard to enjoy media like this. There were lots of “oh, it’s the bad guys, so it’s okay if they die terrible deaths” moments, and I felt uncomfortable at the idea that I was supposed to enjoy that as part of the movie.

Next month, I’m flying to Salt Lake City to attend the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion to present some of my work about social media, religion, and the far right. I’ll be presenting on three different projects at SSSR—this was biting off more than I could chew, but since two of them connect with Mormonism, Salt Lake suggested the possibility of a larger-than-usual audience for that work, so there you go. Of the three projects, one that I’m particularly interested in is some analysis I’m doing of Mormon groups on the far-right social media platform Gab. This has turned into an interesting exploration of what boundaries are firm and what boundaries are porous in Mormon (social and religious) spaces. For example, many of the posts in these Mormon groups are unobjectionable on their own, simply sharing Mormon humor or memes; yet, what’s most interesting about these posts is the implicit compatibility betwteen Mormon groups and the undeniably far-right nature of the overall Gab platform. Even if they don’t say it out loud, these folks clearly see no objection or tension between being a faithful Latter-day Saint and participating in a social media platform that has no interest in policing its users when it “establish[es] LGBTQ+ individuals as abonimations” and otherwise leans hard into the contemporary far right. In contrast, there’s also activity in these groups implicitly criticizing Latter-day Saint leaders (who are traditionally revered as “prophets, seers, and revelators”) for encouraging Latter-day Saints to wear masks and get vaccinated against COVID-19. So, prosocial pandemic behavior crosses a firm line, but spending time on Gab does not.

One of the Vice journalists currently reporting on the Tim Ballard allegations just followed my (now dormant) Twitter account, and I’m going to take that as validation of my research on far-right Mormonism.

Well, this is horrifying. Another example of a news article I wish weren’t relevant to my research.

Free speech is genuinely important, but it’s hard to take the ideal seriously when its advocates twist it to mean something specific and self-serving.

For over three years now, I’ve been getting increasingly involved with research projects that involve the online far right in one way or another. One of the most interesting ways that I’ve developed as a researcher during this time is having to think through in greater detail my commitments to research ethics. Because my research typically focuses on public social media data, I am rarely required to obtain informed consent from those whom I study. Of course, I agree with many internet researchers that this does not absolve me of my ethical responsibilities (I find Fiesler and Proferes’s 2018 paper on this subject particularly helpful). This becomes even trickier, though, when the unwitting “participants” in my research espouse views that I find objectionable. To what extent do I, as a researcher, owe a Twitter (or Gab) user privacy and dignity if they are engaged in homophobic, misogynist, or white nationalist behavior? I’m still figuring this out, but my approach right now—informed heavily by this paper—is to try to err on the side of respect for the user whenever possible.

I appreciate the way that Masnick uses examples from the news to call out how dumb some of these laws are.

I read Torba’s blog post last week but hadn’t been aware of the context. Interesting read.

Lots of directions to go with this one, but “based” is the red pill red flag for me. Lee is (unsurprisingly) borrowing the language of the far right.

McCarthy isn’t saying the same thing as these Telegram channels, but he’s making it easier for them to say what they’re saying.

So much of modern right-wing politics boils down to concerns about masculinity.