How do farright ideas make their way into seemingly mainstream communities? Charges of antisemitic tropes amongst cryptocurrency communities; concerns over eugenics discourses amongst contrarian heterodox thinkers; the rise of antidemocratic identarian politics amongst tech communities; ecofascism within countercultural spirituality groups. Much has been said about the rise of the altright and how its online presence radicalises unsuspecting people into reactionary ideas. However, could these processes be reframed not as direct intentional campaigns of radicalisation, but as a consequence of online communities finding ideological equivalences between extremist and mainstream beliefs?

In this talk we discuss our work attempting to empirically demonstrate the extent of these intersections between different extremist and mainstream communities, and understand how they might form chains of equivalence, intersecting around shared political concepts whilst remaining foundationally opposed. We discuss how the question drove us to developing custom built Twitter mapping and network summarisation tools to allow us to explore and understand the latent community structures formed by 4.2M users, and how it illustrated the ways in which extremist and mainstream communities are not so far apart online, and how they interact.
Bio

Dr. James AllenRobertson is a Senior Lecturer and Computational Sociologist at the University of Essex, UK. His work focuses predominantly on the intersection of tech cultures and extremist politics. His book, Digital Culture Industry (2013, Palgrave) charted the development of digital piracy cultures and systems during the 2000s, and their role in the development of legitimate online digital media economies. His more recent work has focussed on the role of shared discourses between large tech companies and civil liberties groups in their opposition to state surveillance. He currently works closely with the antifascist organisation Hope not hate developing new research methods and is writing a book about the history of extreme politics in tech culture and their contemporary consequences.