‘Let us teach our children’: Online racism and everyday far-right ideologies on TikTok

Abstract

This paper identifies perceptions of injustice, grievance, and alienation as online drivers of radicalisation by concentrating on contemporary visual radicalisation patterns. It focuses on far-right agents of radicalisation in the UK with a particular analysis of visual and ephemeral drivers of radicalisation on social media platforms. We analysed widespread TikTok hashtags which embody mainstream right-wing ideologies. Using these hashtags, we selected four popular videos (> 30k views) for visual thematic analysis of their compositional content and comment-sphere to explore everyday representations and discourses of far-right ideologies. Our findings highlight mundane online expressions on TikTok that collectively reinforce notions of a shared idealised identity built on nostalgic reinterpretations of an imperial past, which contribute to the mainstreaming of far-right ideas and ideologies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 New Labour is a period of the Labour Party from 1997 onwards, maintaining its support in the 2001 and 2005 elections.

2 The Brexit vote took place on the 23rd of June 2016 to leave the EU. The UK then withdrew from the EU on the 31st of January 2020.

3 Prager University is an American non-profit media company without an academic accreditation. It creates content supporting and spreading right-wing views (Bernstein 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This research was part of the project entitled “De-Radicalisation in Europe and Beyond: Detect, Resolve, Re-integrate”, funded by Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Framework Programme [grant number 959198].

Notes on contributors

Ozge Ozduzen

Dr Ozge Ozduzen is lecturer in Digital Media and Society in the Department of Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK. She is a PI on the British Academy project entitled ‘Mapping and visualising intersections of social inequalities, community mistrust, and vaccine hesitancy in online and physical spaces in the UK and US’ and co-PI on the Horizon 2020 project D.Rad: Deradicalization in Europe and Beyond: Detect, Resolve, Reintegrate.

Nelli Ferenczi

Dr Nelli Ferenczi is a lecturer in Psychology and a member of the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University London. She is a Co-I on the British Academy project entitled ‘Mapping and visualising intersections of social inequalities, community mistrust, and vaccine hesitancy in online and physical spaces in the UK and US’ co-PI on the Horizon 2020 project D.Rad: Deradicalization in Europe and Beyond: Detect, Resolve, Reintegrate.

Isabel Holmes

Isabel Holmes is a doctoral researcher in Computer Science at Brunel University London. Having completed a BSc in Psychology and an MSc in Data Science at Goldsmiths, University of London, she works on Computational Social Psychology and she was a research assistant for the Horizon 2020 project D.Rad: Deradicalization in Europe and Beyond: Detect, Resolve, Reintegrate.