More Than Meets the Reply: Examining Belonging in Far-Right Online Social Media Space

The conventional understanding of fringe social media use is that they offer an unmoderated safe space for far-right communications while mimicking mainstream affordances. However, what if these online interactive spaces behave differently than their mainstream counterparts, transcending the common perception beyond simply facilitating interaction and engagement? And if they differ, how does far-right fringe media fulfil its users’ social needs? In proving the former and answering the latter, the article attempts to shift our conceptualisation of how fringe media operates, illustrating how these platforms work by promoting far-right attachment and membership in an online environment. To highlight the far-right’s attraction to these online spaces, the article offers an amalgamative theoretical approach, thematically restructuring seminal works on belonging to understand its use in fringe media. In combination with this framework and building upon the literature on far-right virtual collectives, I demonstrate how counter-mainstream media serves as the unifier for these participants seeking an in-group of like-minded individuals. Moreover, I argue that these spaces and their users’ collective quest for escapism provide more than the social environments of mainstream platforms, offering a sense of belonging and fulfilment to the social needs of those who feel rejected by other communities – both offline and online. Subsequently, to study these phenomena and findings, platform and userbase selection is important. The study examines Gab, a popular alternative technology website which offers similar affordances to Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, and its subgroup, ‘Introduce Yourself’. Herein, participants can share their online experiences on other virtual mediums, their reasons for joining the platform, and their identifying characteristics and sense of self. The article utilises a mixed-methods technique between netnography and sentiment analysis to uncover the complex narrational insights projected by these subgroup participants on Gab. Merging, across 1500 posts, netnography’s immersive collection techniques with sentiment analysis’ emphasis on emotional connections in discourse, the methodological approach establishes the foundational sense of community and in-group belonging across the site’s international userbase and how these essential mechanisms work to fulfil its participants’ social needs.