Abstract
Anonymous online groups such as imageboards have increasing cultural influence. Recently, they have been connected with far-right political movements. This mixed-methods study investigates politics on Overboard, a Finnish imageboard. We use a convolutional neural network to learn linguistic features of the community’s own understanding of politics, studying two large text corpora, collected in 2014–2015 and 2018–2019. This enables us to find political messages in nominally non-political subforums and discount non-political “noise”—finding the “needles in the haystack.” We quantify the prevalence of political talk on Overboard, assess its themes using topic modeling, and evaluate changes in their popularity. Finally, we qualitatively analyze the style of Overboard. We find that around one-tenth of messages on Overboard are identifiable as “political.” Often, but not univocally, they voice far-right opinions, usually somewhat ironically. The prevalence of far-right themes has increased, likely because of importing global imageboard culture and in parallel with the increased popularity of nationalist-right politics in the broader Finnish public sphere. In terms of group style, the strong boundary between members and outsiders, together with the ironic and cynical speech norms, creates a bond between members. Such a group style lends itself to politicizing the collective.
Highlights
Imageboards, such as 4chan and the Finnish Ylilauta (“Overboard”), are online discussion forums where anyone can post anonymously and which have developed their own peculiar subcultures
Overboard’s group style, we argue, is defined by boundary-work toward a constitutive outside of “normies.” In the absence of personal connections between users in an anonymous space, these delimitations to who we are not—and which are unavoidably political— constitute most of the bonds of the community that is Overboard
When studying politics in a community in which ironic “trolling” is a central practice, many will ask whether anything said on Overboard can be “taken seriously,” and if so, how do we know what can and what cannot (Phillips, 2016)? We argue that the situation is more complex than a simple dichotomy between “serious” and “insincere” political expressions, as can be seen in discussions where users self-reflect on their ironic disposition
Summary
Imageboards, such as 4chan and the Finnish Ylilauta (“Overboard”), are online discussion forums where anyone can post anonymously and which have developed their own peculiar subcultures. They are online spaces of cultural consumption and production, and birthplaces of various memes and discourses, which sometimes cross over to the mainstream. Identityfocused political subcultures have growth potential in online grassroots spaces, and ideologues of contemporary politics, on the identity-focused “alt”-right, have become to see online communities such as imageboards as battlegrounds in waging their “culture war” (Hine et al, 2017; Lewis, 2020; Nagle, 2017)
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