The making of far-right platforms – Alt-Tech affordances and their impact on online community-building

With large social media platforms coming under increased pressure to deplatform far-right users, the Alternative Technology movement (Alt-Tech) emerged as a new digital support infrastructure for the far right. Though these platforms began as little more than poorly functioning mirrors of their mainstream competitors, they have grown into their own, providing a unique set of affordances with a specific, political user base in mind. In this paper, we examine two of the most successful Alt-Tech platforms: Gab, a microblogging platform, that was used by the perpetrator of the Pittsburgh Synagogue terrorist attack to post his last messages before the attack; and Odysee, a blockchain based video sharing platform, harbouring a wealth of anti-Semitic and other extremist content. We argue that both platforms represent technological as well as movement innovations, enabling content propagation with close to zero moderation. They rely on either their own servers or decentralization to shield themselves from consequences of these moderation-policies. In this paper, we conduct a qualitative analysis of the technological affordances of Gab and Odysee, comparing the market and ideology-driven features of the platforms. We argue that these technological features, and the kinds of communicative interactions they encourage and enable, have a direct impact on the specific far-right communities forming on these platforms.