Hybrid Media Systems and the Far-Right – Infrastructures, Practices, and Connections Across Borders

Abstract

The rise of far-right and populist parties and movements across Europe as well as the right-wing shifts that have accompanied the Trump Presidency in the US signal profound challenges to Western liberal democracies. Digitalization and networked information flows add an essential dimension to these trends, as actors on the political right appear to benefit in particular from the affordances of new information and communication technologies (Ekman, 2014; Schmitt et al. 2018). They employ new networked modes of communication, establish and build up digital infrastructures for information and mobilization and use new communication practices such as memes and other forms of visual propaganda, such as gifs and video blogs (vlogs). The panel addresses these developments in right-wing communication from a comparative, transnational and cross-media perspective. It asks how far-right political actors use the affordances of digital platforms to establish networks of communication and support within and especially across borders. With this, it looks at which communication practices right-wingers use to spread their ideas and visions across the different layers of digitally interconnected platforms, from more radical into mainstream spheres as well as across countries and epistemic communities. Particular interest lies in the role of platform architectures and new modes of communication such as the recontextualization of cultural imagery and the interconnections between radical groups, party communication and mainstream media spheres. Despite the significant role of social media, most studies on far-right communication and mobilization are still relying on analyzing newspaper articles or surveys. Moreover, studies that address social media platforms often do not take into account how platforms shape these forms of mobilization. To explore these questions further, the panel brings together research contributions that focus on far-right actors' communication infrastructures and their various practices across platforms and media types (Websites, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram) as well as across a variety of European countries and the US. In doing so, it specifies the conditions under which right-wing actors, media, platform architectures, and content characteristics contribute to the establishment of anti-democratic public spheres across spatial and discursive boundaries.

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