The Discursive Mechanisms of the Radical Right Online: How Stormfront.org Reacted to the Elections of Obama and Trump

How do social movements react to discursive and institutional changes relating to their goals? Do changes in line with their interests lead to an upswing in activity due to expanding opportunities for mobilization, or rather a decrease since grievances instead become channeled into institutional politics? When the tide instead turns against them, do they react by despair and passivity, or do they become engaged and activated? These questions are intensively debated in the social movement literature and empirical studies show different and partly contradicting results, implying that there is an intricate and complex interaction at play. While existing research has focused on publicly visible movement activity (e.g. the frequency of protests and types of strategies employed) this paper takes a novel approach by focusing on how the institutional context affects the discursive mechanisms within extreme right movements, including e.g. the rationale, motivation, and choices of goals, strategies and tactics. These issues have previously been neglected in the literature, mainly due to the difficulties associated with collecting empirical data in a field that is characterized by closure and secrecy, and where field research can even bring the risk of physical harm. Therefore, this study looks at Stormfront: the largest extreme right forum in the world consisting of more than 320 000 members and spanning over 20 years. This forum is widely regarded as a dominant hub for extreme right activists and groups from across the globe; a space for ideological debate, planning upcoming activities, recruiting new members, and having open discussions about strategies and tactics. Due to these roles, the forum offers unique access to the grassroots discourses of the extreme right movement. Using a quasi-experimental design, the paper compares the impact on the forum of the presidential elections of Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016. Both elections represent significant institutional and discursive changes of society, and this paper investigates how these changes influence the forum. More specifically, we look at changes in both relational patterns and textual content, including: membership and user activity; interactions and alliances between groups and individuals; emotions and sentiments; what type of strategies and tactics are promoted; processes of collective identity formation and the construction of out-groups. The corpus consists of 330,000 users, and their 10 million posts organized in 900,000 discussion threads, scraped using custom made web crawlers. This material is analyzed using a computational hermeneutics approach, combining qualitative and quantitative methods, including e.g. topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and social network analysis. The paper sheds light on the relationship between activism and public policy by focusing on the discursive mechanisms underlying these processes. The paper thus responds to a recent call in the political opportunity literature for a shift in focus from conditions to tracing the processes and mechanisms underlying mobilizations. The paper also contributes by investigating the activists and grassroots of the extreme right, which so far constitute a relatively unexplored territory in the literature.