In Search for Unexpected Allies? Radical Right Remediation of ‘the 2015 Refugee Crisis’ on Social Media

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter analyses the remediation of the mainstream news cycle on the ‘refugee crisis’ to the social media audiences of two Finnish anti-immigration groups, namely ‘Close the Borders!’ and ‘Finland First’. The analysis focuses on the post-truth tropes employed by these groups as practices for subverting information and interpretations originally sourced to epistemic authorities. In doing so, the chapter provides a more nuanced approach to the post-truth tropes where the generation of ‘fake news’ and explicit disinformation is only the tip of the iceberg. The results show that by harnessing careful and context-sensitive remediation practices, the radical right is effectively able to hijack the news cycle with the alleged support from ‘unlikely allies’ among epistemic authorities.