The affordances of extreme speech

Abstract

New media studies invested in online political conflict, radical and antagonistic subcultures have taken an interest in the affordances that shape memes, vernaculars and online political communication. One often overlooked affordance is the ensemble of social, communication, platform and legal frameworks stipulating what users can and cannot say, which I call “speech affordances.” To explore this concept, I look at the strategic communication of 4chan, Twitter and YouTube subcultures tied to a historical meme, “Kekistan,” often perceived as a key example of the ideological cacophony of the 2015–2017 online “culture wars.” I focus on how 4chan's policy of user anonymity, YouTube's unmoderated comment sections and Twitter's more proactive moderation practices brought some influencers to alter the original connotations of the meme into “overt” messages tolerable to Twitter and YouTube out-groups and platform moderation policies. Speech affordances bear methodological implications for historical studies of speech moderation and the overall mechanisms in which problematic language adapts to spaces with distinct speech norms.