The European Far-Right Politics of Truth in Digital Spaces

In political science, the relationship between the far right and truth has been explored through Gramsci's concept of hegemony (Schilk, 2025), populism studies (Ylä-Anttila, 2018), network analysis (Deem, 2023), and post-truth frameworks (Cassidy, 2020). By often implying a complete departure from objectivity as if far-right discourses primarily appealed to emotions, existing studies have overlooked how the far right strategically leverages digital spaces to perform journalistic and/or scientific authority. Moreover, by focusing on specific national contexts through mono-disciplinary lenses, existing scholarship fails to provide a comprehensive analysis of the European far-right politics of truth in digital spaces, obscuring how its transnational nature has facilitated the circulation of extremist ideologies that directly threaten democratic stability and social cohesion. According to Maly (2024), digital media affordances have fundamentally transformed the contemporary far right's metapolitical project. Beyond enabling ordinary citizens to exercise unprecedented influence through networked communication (Castells, 2009), digital platforms and their algorithmic systems of recommendation have amplified truths that systematically discriminate against minority groups (Buarque, 2024). This Workshop expands research by Buarque, Scopelliti, and Zavershinskaia (under review) demonstrating how French, German, and British far-right media outlets active on X produce common truths rooted in racial hatred, legitimise conspiracy theories linked to violent extremism, and maintain symbiotic relationships with far-right intellectuals, political parties, and legacy media segments. Given the potential impacts of an essentially discriminatory politics of truth amplified by algorithms, this Workshop makes a timely contribution to the discipline while fostering collaboration among a diverse cohort of scholars.

A. Deem, ‘Feminine, Not Feminist”: Trad Truth-making on Social Media’, Ethnologia Europaea, 53(2) (2023), pp.21-40. B. Buarque, A. Scopelliti and P. Zavershinskaia, ‘The Far-Right Politics of Truth: a comparative analysis of the common truths produced by far-right media outlets in France, Germany, and in the UK,’ Political Ideologies (under review). B. Buarque, The Power of the Alt-Right Multitude: How and Why Alt-Right Conspiracy Theories Have Been Legitimised in Online Spaces. [online] University of Manchester (2024). Available at: https://www.librarysearch.manchester.ac.uk/permalink/44MAN_INST/bofker/alma992987527698101631 F. Schilk, ‘The Metapolitics of Crises: How the New Right Weaponises Narratives to Mainstream Far-Right Ideology’, Int J Polit Cult Soc (2025). I. Maly, Metapolitics, algorithms and violence: new right activism and terrorism in the attention economy (London: Routledge, 2024). J. Cassidy, ‘How Post-Truth Politics Transformed and Shaped the Outcome of the 2016 Brexit Referendum’, in S. Giusti and E. Piras (Eds.), Democracy and Fake News (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 53-63. M. Castells, Communication Power (London: Oxford University Press, 2009). T. Ylä-Anttila, ‘Populist Knowledge: ‘Post-truth’ Repertoires of Contesting Epistemic Authorities’, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 5(4) (2018), pp. 356-388.

1: What are the shared truths produced by European far-right media outlets/intellectuals across digital platforms?
2: How has the European far-right digital apparatus of truth benefitted from algorithmic recommendation and GenAI?
3: How do far-right media/intellectuals operate symbiotically with legacy media, parties, online subcultures?
4: How has the European far-right politics of truth legitimised stigmatising conspiracy theories?
5: How has European far-right politics of truth undermined trust, influenced policy, voting, violence?

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