When Do We #NotWelcomeRefugees: Detecting Expansion and Radicalization of Far Right Forces in Digital Spaces

In the last few years, we have seen a number of digitally-based humanitarian campaigns led by various authorities--state, UNHCR, and civil society—that attempted to foster solidarity between receiving countries and refugees. These campaigns raised awareness, asserted refugee rights, and lobbied for more welcoming policies in digital spaces using pro-refugee hashtags such as #WelcomeRefugee, #RefugeesWelcome, #Letthemstay, and #WithRefugees. As part of wider resistance, a strong backlash emerged that was organized through a different set of hashtags: #FuckRefugees, #Rapefugees and #NotWelcomeRefugees. This paper explores how twitter discourses deployed to counter solidarity with refugees also function to expand and radicalize the far-right. Rather than see twitter discourses as simply part of the range of expressions existing in the public sphere, we argue this case shows how far-right participants in social media are mobilizing as transnational collectives, through hashtags and co-occurring hashtags, while debating the normative content of social policy. Scholars have begun to take seriously the notion that hashtags function as organizing tools, creating ad hoc issue publics (Bruns and Burgess 2011) to respond to events in real time but also connect like-minded users. In investigating three specific anti-refugee hashtags, we ask: how do hashtags operate to connect users through an event or “crisis”? Further, we broaden the scope of our investigation to include co-occurring hashtags that often link to groups, sentiments, and reinforce political and moral dispositions. We ask: what types of transnational and salient linkages are being enacted with co-occurring hashtags? Recent work on the “Refugee Crisis” in Europe considers how digital spaces have enabled “uncivil” engagement (Ekman 2018). Our research likewise shows how hate speech online towards migrants has become linked to far right politics. First, we find that the anti-refugee hashtags #FuckRefugees, #Rapefugees and #NotWelcomeRefugees functioned to link users transnationally in ad hoc publics over extended periods of time. Secondly, we find that the tweets linked by anti-refugee hashtags tend to include co-occurring hashtags that connect to exclusionary, ethno-nationalist and Islamophobic views and refer to specific hate groups and politicians. Some co-occurring hashtags even contain references, sometimes coded, to conspiracy theories, historical events, and white supremacist symbols that comprise the political program of the far-right. The article is an initial attempt to bridge communications studies of social media discourse, social movement studies, and IR norm contestation theories related to framing, and proposes we examine hashtags and co-occurring hashtags as discursive tools that reveal contention around the politics of solidarity promotion and resistance. Using a mixed-method approach combining social media and discourse analysis, we generate multiple empirical observations on the nature of anti-refugee attitudes, providing new information not only about the mixed results of mobilization efforts to foster solidarity but also how these discourses connect to larger trends of far right digital mobilization. Careful identification of political sentiments and understanding how social media contributes to organizing will enable activists and governments to better respond to and combat expansion and radicalization of the far right in digital spaces and beyond.