Abstract
In 2019, the authors led a workshop at King’s College London examining how to study 4chan and assess their association with the Alt-Right. Unbeknownst to the authors, a participant was a 4chan user and started a mid-workshop thread on its notorious /pol/ (politically incorrect) board. It gained significant attention. Reviewing it later, the authors realised that this parallel thread illustrates perfectly the challenges researching 4chan – and similar – communities. We conducted discourse analysis on this unique dataset, providing an alternative perspective to predominant anthropological and informatic approaches. Our analysis enhances understanding of ‘free-extremist’ communities such as 4chan in several ways. It assesses how the /pol/ community responds to observation and provides new insights into roles influencers might have in radicalising others. It illustrates the value of discourse analysis in evaluating users’ associations with the Alt-Right. Finally, it proposes ways researchers can overcome the challenges faced when analysing such communities.
Highlights
There is escalating concern, across national governments, inter-governmental organisations and think tanks, about the rise of far-right extremism globally (Chazan, 2019; Guterres, 2018; Jones, 2018)
Since discourse analysis primarily focuses on language in use, we focus first on site content, the users responsible for it and the broader implications researchers must consider
How consistent and coherent are identities and ideologies expressed in site content? Our analysis finds four recurring political identities and ideologies: commitment to extreme freedom of speech; belief that the community possesses a superior understanding of the world to outsiders; critique of the hypocrisies of liberalism, and belief in the community’s ability to ‘redpill’ site visitors
Summary
The challenge in analysing sentiment will be expanded on later when discussing the role of influencers on the site (see question 5), when we illustrate that only by examining language use in combination with the images and video footage users post can we develop a more accurate and nuanced reading of the platform’s discourse Beyond terminology, another challenge is differentiating serious and ironic communication. Our analysis finds four recurring political identities and ideologies: commitment to extreme freedom of speech; belief that the community possesses a superior understanding of the world to outsiders; critique of the hypocrisies of liberalism, and belief in the community’s ability to ‘redpill’ site visitors These were consistent throughout our thread – further research is needed to substantiate whether similar consistency is found across /pol/ messaging boards, or 4chan more generally. Many early points were general critiques of us ‘cuckademics’, employing age-old stereotypes about academia:
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