9th Biennial ACSPRI Social Science Methodology Conference

Literature on the alt-right’s social media presence in the mid-2010s asserts the alt-right’s implication in other significant online phenomena of the period. Researchers have argued that social media platforms are opportune spaces for extremism to occur, highlighting the co-occurrence on the Reddit social media news platform of the misogynistic online harassment campaign Gamergate, the MAGA political movement popularised by Donald Trump, and the alt-right. But the implication of MAGA and Gamergate in the alt-right remains more asserted than empirically demonstrated to date. Therefore, this research asks: to what extent did alt-right activity relate to the activity of Gamergate and MAGA on Reddit? This analysis uses social network analysis (SNA) to identify the alt-right and its activity on a number of subreddits on Reddit, before exploring whether the alt-right is so closely related to MAGA and Gamergate that their collective constituencies of millions of Redditors can be generalised into the alt-right.

This research demonstrates a relational methodological framework to examining the overlaps and distinctions between reputationally and circumstantially adjacent phenomena on a large-scale platform like Reddit. Through applying SNA to large-scale Reddit trace data, it finds that alt-right Redditors constitute a narrow and largely unique constituency on Reddit. Alt-right Redditors, as identified among subreddits like /r/altright, see the usefulness of the presence and momentum of MAGA and Gamergate as an opportunity to ‘redpill’ potential ideologues into the alt-right’s Anti-Semitic, white nationalist identity through drawing on similar grievances to their ideology. However, Gamergate and MAGA Redditors in /r/KotakuInAction and /r/The_Donald largely do not engage in alt-right activity among /r/altright and its counterparts. These phenomena remain qualitatively distinct in ideology and activity, including through expressing disinterest or repellence at the extremism of the alt-right. Notably, alt-right Redditors also resent how third-parties conflate the alt-right with Gamergate or MAGA due to the perceived ideological impurity of the latter phenomena. This analysis finds that the alt-right was only loosely associated with these larger adjacent phenomena during this mid-2010s period. Its methodology and findings justify the necessity of examining the specific relationship between phenomena to avoid presumptive generalisations of social media users that may belie significant differences of ideology and behaviour.