Out of the Frame: Exploring Far Right Social Media Discourse Through Value-Related Theories

For almost half a century, frame analysis has been pivotal in social movement research. A large portion of this scholarship focuses on how social movements aggregate grievances in collective action frames in order to recruit and mobilize constituents. However, wide reliance on frame analysis has also drawn extensive critique, both inside and outside of social movement studies, based on the idea that a heavy dependence on frames comes at the expense of potentially more useful concepts. One of the terms that often gets bracketed when focusing on frames is values. While frame analyses of social movements often reference values, this body of knowledge rarely interacts with key theories of values or strives to develop its own theory of values. In this paper, we argue that the theoretical prism of values can shed light on fundamental aspects of the operations and digital presence of social movements. Integrating existing theories, we define values as guiding beliefs about the desirable that relate to people’s perceptions about how they should conduct their lives, both as individuals and as collectives. We argue that a closer attention to values is warranted in light of the new dynamics of social mobilization conceptualized by Bennett and Segerberg as the “logic of connective action”. As individuals increasingly participate in social mobilization through personalized (rather than collective) action frames, we contend that they simultaneously express personal values and construct shared ones. Starting from a small sample of official social media outlets of the Italian far right (parties, party leaders, official newspapers), we identified a number of key dates around which far right constituents mobilize every year. We then sampled Twitter and Instagram posts containing personalized action frames that adhere to a genre of user-generated content we define as “alternative calendar commemorations”. These are posts in which users commemorate an event or a historical figure that is key to the imaginary of the far right but is not crucial for mainstream society. Finally, we used Schwartz’s (1992) model of ten basic personal values as a basis for a qualitative analysis of the posts. Based on previous research of the ideological characterization of the far right, we would expect to find the values of tradition, security, conformity, and power in the personalized action frames. Results, however, tell a somewhat different story. While we do find such expected values to be expressed widely, connective action frames from the far right also reference to values that are supposedly in conflict with the ones listed above, such as self-direction and stimulation. We conclude that a focus on values adds a significant layer to our understanding of connective action. Furthermore, the complex mix of values found in the data allows us to reflect back on existing theories of values, suggesting that the study of the expression of values on social media can offer a way to challenge and update canonical value theories.