https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6211-7939
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Abstract
This article examines the visual strategy of the U.K. radical right group Britain First as they were removed from Facebook and migrated to a less regulated platform – Gab. Data was collected over two four month periods in 2017 and 2018. Using methods from discourse analysis, the study identifies visual changes in terms of content, including a shift on Gab toward promoting the group's inner core members and expanding “othering” practices to Islam broadly. Changes in visual style were also identified, notably from the routine posting of esthetically polished images, to a reliance on unedited images. The article concludes with policy recommendations for governments and tech companies regarding the removal of visual radical right online content.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 As per other scholarship (see e.g. Lorraine Bowman-Grieve, “Exploring “Stormfront”: A Virtual Community of the Radical Right,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 32, no. 11 (2009): 989–1007; Ryan Scrivens, Garth Davies, and Richard Frank, “Measuring the Evolution of Radical Right-Wing Posting Behaviors Online,” Deviant Behavior 41, (2018): 1–17, ‘radical right’ is used in this article as an umbrella term for extreme and far right groups. In our paper, we draw upon Mudde’s definition of populist radical right groups as those that “share a core ideology that combines (at least) three features: nativism, authoritarianism, and populism” (Cas Mudde, “Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe Today,” Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas: History and Recent Trends. London: Bloomsbury (2015): 295–307. We also draw upon Berger’s definition of extremism as “the belief that an in-group’s success or survival can never be separated from the need for hostile action against an out-group” (J. M. Berger, Extremism (London: MIT Press, 2018), 44).
2 House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, “Radicalisation: The Counter-Narrative and Identifying the Tipping Point,” HC 135, p. 4, accessed November 21, 2019, https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmhaff/135/135.pdf.
3 BBC News, “Donald Trump Prepared to Apologise for Britain First Retweets,” BBC, accessed November 21, 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42829555
4 Maura Conway, Ryan Scrivens, and Logan McNair, “Right-Wing Extremists’ Persistent Online Presence: History and Contemporary Trends,” ICCT Policy Brief (2019): 1–24; Ryan Scrivens and Maura Conway, “The Roles of “Old” and “New” Media Tools and Technologies in the Facilitation of Violent Extremism and Terrorism,” (2020): 286–309; Jacob Davey and Julia Ebner, “The Fringe Insurgency. Connectivity, Convergence and Mainstreaming of the Extreme Right,” Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2017, http://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/The-Fringe-Insurgency-221017.pdf.
5 Bharath Ganesh and Bright Jonathan, Extreme Digital Speech: Contexts, Responses and Solutions, VOX-Pol Report, (2020).
6 Accessed December 15, 2019, https://www.bmjv.de/SharedDocs/Gesetzgebungsverfahren/Dokumente/NetzDG_engl.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=2.
7 Accessed December 15, 2019, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32018H0334&from=FR.
8 Broadly similar, too, are Australia’s Abhorrent Violent Material Bill accessed via https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislation/Bills_Search_Results/Result?bId=s1201; France’s Law Proposition to fight against the hatred on the internet accessed via http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/15/textes/l15b1785_proposition-loi; and Films, Videos and Publications Classification (Urgent Interim Classification of Publications and Prevention of Online Harm) Amendment Bill in New Zealand accessed via http://legislation.govt.nz/bill/government/2020/0268/3.0/LMS294551.html
9 Maura Conway, “We Need a ‘Visual Turn’ in Violent Online Extremism Research”, VOX-Pol Blog, (2019), accessed December 15, 2019, https://www.voxpol.eu/we-need-a-visual-turn-in-violent-online-extremism-research/.
10 Maura Conway, “Determining the Role of the Internet in Violent Extremism and Terrorism: Six Suggestions for Progressing Research,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 40, no. 1 (2017): 77–98.
11 Matthew Collins, “The Truth about Britain First – The One-Man Band with a Knack for Facebook,” The Guardian, 2015, accessed December 15, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/25/truth-britain-first-facebook-far-right-bnp.
12 Britain First’s Mission Statement was available at https://www.britainfirst.org/mission-statement but has now been removed.
13 Alex Hern and Kevin Rawlinson, “Facebook Bans Britain First and its Leaders,” The Guardian, 2018, accessed November 21, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/14/facebook-bans-britain-first-and-its-leaders.
14 Patrick Hermansson, “Online Hate: The Year In Numbers,” Hope Not Hate, undated, accessed November 21, 2019, https://www.hopenothate.org.uk/research/state-of-hate-2018/.
15 Savvas Zannettou, Barry Bradlyn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Haewoon Kwak, Michael Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringini, and Jeremy Blackburn, “What Is Gab: A Bastion of Free Speech or an Alt-Right Echo Chamber,” in Companion Proceedings of the The Web Conference 2018, (Association for Computing Machinery, 2018), 1007–14; Lucas Lima, Julio C. S. Reis, Philipe Melo, Fabricio Murai, Leandro Araujo, Pantelis Vikatos, and Fabricio Benevenuto, “Inside the Right-Leaning Echo Chambers: Characterizing Gab, an Unmoderated Social System,” In 2018 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM) (IEEE, 2018), 515–22; David Gilbert, Here’s how big far right social network Gab has actually become. Vice. (2019) Accessed June 26, 2020 via https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/pa7dwg/heres-how-big-far-right-social-network-gab-has-actually-become; Jane Coaston, Gab, the social media platform favoured by the alleged Pittsburgh shooter, explained. Vox. (2018) accessed June 26, 2020 via https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/29/18033006/gab-social-media-anti-semitism-neo-nazis-twitter-facebook.
16 Kelly Weill, “Gab in Full Meltdown, and Founder Andrew Torba Blames the ‘Deep State’,” The Daily Beast, 2019, accessed October 23, 2019, https://www.thedailybeast.com/gab-is-in-full-meltdown-and-founder-andrew-torba-blames-the-deep-state.
17 David Gilbert, “Here’s How Big Far Right Social Network Gab Has Actually Become,” Vice, 2019, accessed October 22, 2019, https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/pa7dwg/heres-how-big-far-right-social-network-gab-has-actually-become.
18 Gab Homepage < gab.com >, accessed December 15, 2019.
19 Tom Bennett, “Gab Is the Alt-Right Social Network Racists Are Moving to,” Vice, 2018, accessed December 15, 2019, https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/ywxb95/gab-is-the-alt-right-social-network-racists-are-moving-to.
20 Andrew Torba, “Building a People First Community, a Response to Mark Zuckerberg,” Medium, 2017. This article is no longer available as Medium has since removed all of Gab’s articles from their site.
21 Ryan Scrivens and Maura Conway, “The Roles of ‘Old’and ‘New’ Media Tools and Technologies in the Facilitation of Violent Extremism and Terrorism,” in The Human Factor of Cybercrime, ed. Rutger Leukfeldt and Thomas J. Holt, (London: Taylor & Francis, 2019), 286–309.
22 Jacob Davey and Julia Ebner, “The Fringe Insurgency. Connectivity, Convergence and Mainstreaming of the Extreme Right,” Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 2017, http://www. isdglobal. org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/The-Fringe-Insurgency-221017. pdf.
23 Roderick Graham, “Inter-Ideological Mingling: White Extremist Ideology Entering the Mainstream on Twitter,” Sociological Spectrum 36, no. 1 (2016): 24–36.
24 Andrew Brindle and Corrie MacMillan, “Like & Share If You Agree: A Study of Discourses and Cyber Activism of the Far-Right British Nationalist Party Britain First,” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 5, no. 1 (2017): 108–33.
25 See e.g., Ruth Wodak, The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean (London: Sage, 2015); Paul Hainsworth, ed., The Extreme Right in Europe and the USA (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016); Andrew Brindle and Corrie MacMillan, “Like & Share If You Agree: A Study of Discourses and Cyber Activism of the Far-Right British Nationalist Party Britain First,” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 5, no. 1 (2017): 108–33. Michał Krzyżanowski and Per Ledin, “Uncivility on the Web: Populism in/and the Borderline Discourses of Exclusion,” Journal of Language and Politics 16, no. 4 (2017): 566–81; Jens Rydgren, “Radical Right-Wing Parties in Europe: What’s Populism Got to do With It?” Journal of Language and Politics 16, no. 4 (2017): 485–96; Claes H. De Vreese, Frank Esser, Toril Aalberg, Carsten Reinemann, and James Stanyer, “Populism as an Expression of Political Communication Content and Style: A New Perspective,” The International Journal of Press/Politics 23, no. 4 (2018): 423–38.
26 Lella Nouri and Nuria Lorenzo-Dus, “Investigating Reclaim Australia and Britain First’s Use of Social Media: Developing a New Model of Imagined Political Communities Online,” Journal for Deradicalization 18 (2019): 1–37; Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Lella Nouri, “The Discourse of the US Alt-Right Online–A Case Study of the Traditionalist Worker Party Blog,” Critical Discourse Studies (2020): 1–19; Val Burris, Emery Smith, and Ann Strahm, “White Supremacist Networks on the Internet,” Sociological Focus 33, no. 2 (2000): 215–35; Jacob Davey and Julia Ebner, “The Fringe Insurgency. Connectivity, Convergence and Mainstreaming of the Extreme Right,” Institute for Strategic Dialogue (http://www. isdglobal. org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/The-Fringe-Insurgency-221017.pdf, 2017); Lorraine Bowman-Grieve, “Exploring “Stormfront”: A Virtual Community of the Radical Right,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 32, no. 11 (2009): 989–1007.
27 Wodak, Ruth, P. Nowak, J. Pelikan, H. Gruber, R. de Cillia, and R. Mitten. ‘Wir sind alle unschuldige Täter!’ Diskurshistorische Studien zum Nachkriegsantisemitismus in Österreich. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990).
28 Andrew Brindle and Corrie MacMillan, “Like & Share If You Agree: A Study of Discourses and Cyber Activism of the Far-Right British Nationalist Party Britain First,” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 5, no. 1 (2017): 108–33.
29 Lella Nouri and Nuria Lorenzo-Dus, “Investigating Reclaim Australia and Britain First's Use of Social Media: Developing a New Model of Imagined Political Communities Online,” Journal for Deradicalization 18 (2019): 1–37.
30 Amy-Louise Watkin and Seán Looney, ““The Lions of Tomorrow”: A News Value Analysis of Child Images in Jihadi Magazines,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 42, no. 1–2 (2019): 120–140; Stuart Macdonald and Nuria Lorenzo-Dus, “Visual Jihad: Constructing the “Good Muslim” in Online Jihadist Magazines,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism (2018): 1–23.
31 Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
32 Theo Van Leeuwen, Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
33 Attila Kovács, “The ‘New Jihadists’ and the Visual Turn From al-Qa’ida to ISIL/ISIS/Da’ish,” Bitzpol Affairs 2, no. 3 (2015): 47–69.
34 Georg Stenberg, “Conceptual and Perceptual Factors in the Picture Superiority Effect,” European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 18, no. 6 (2006): 813–47.
35 Wayne Wanta and Virginia Roark, “Cognitive and Affective Responses to Newspaper Photographs,” (1993).
36 Dolf Zillmann, Silvia Knobloch, and Hong-sik Yu, “Effects of Photographs on the Selective Reading of News Reports,” Media Psychology 3, no. 4 (2001): 301–24.
37 Paul Messaris and Linus Abraham, “The Role of Images in Framing News Stories,” in Framing public life, ed. Paul Messaris and Linus Abraham, (London: Routledge, 2001), 231–42; Lesley Wischmann, “Dying on the Front Page: Kent State and the Pulitzer Prize,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 2, no. 2 (1987): 67–74; Lulu Rodriguez and Daniela V. Dimitrova, “The Levels of Visual Framing,” Journal of Visual Literacy 30, no. 1 (2011): 48–65.
38 Nicole Smith Dahmen and Daniel D. Morrison, “Place, Space, Time: Media Gatekeeping and Iconic Imagery in the Digital and Social Media Age,” Digital Journalism 4, no. 5 (2016): 658–78; Vicki Goldberg, The Power of Photography: How Photographs Changed Our Lives. Abbeville Pr, 1991; David D. Perlmutter, Visions of War: Picturing Warfare from the Stone Age to the Cyber Age (Macmillan, 1999); Barbie Zelizer, About to Die: How News Images Move the Public (Oxford University Press, 2010).
39 Diane Rasmussen Pennington, “Coding of Non-Text Data,”The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods (2017): 232–50.
40 Raymond Drainville, “Iconography for the Age of Social Media,” Humanities 7, no. 1 (2018): 12.
41 Ryan Scrivens and Maura Conway, “The Roles of “Old” and “New” Media Tools and Technologies in the Facilitation of Violent Extremism and Terrorism, (2020): 286–309.
42 Maura Conway, “We Need a ‘Visual Turn’ in Violent Online Extremism Research,” VOX-Pol Blog, 2029, accessed December 16, 2019, https://www.voxpol.eu/we-need-a-visual-turn-in-violent-online-extremism-research/.
43 Nicole Doerr, “Bridging Language Barriers, Bonding Against Immigrants: A Visual Case Study of Transnational Network Publics Created by Far-Right Activists in Europe,” Discourse & Society 28, no. 1 (2017): 3–23.
44 Philipp Karl, “Hungary's Radical Right 2.0,” Nationalities Papers 45, no. 3 (2017): 345–55.
45 Bernhard Forchtner and Christoffer Kølvraa, “Extreme Right Images of Radical Authenticity: Multimodal Aesthetics of History, Nature, and Gender Roles in Social Media,” European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 4, no. 3 (2017): 252–81.
46 Dan Prisk, “The Hyperreality of the Alt Right: How Meme Magic Works to Create a Space for Far Right Politics,” (2017).
47 Savvas Zannettou, Tristan Caulfield, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Michael Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringhini, and Guillermo Suarez-Tangil, “On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities, in Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2018, (Association for Computing Machinery, 2018), 188–202.
48 Rob Merrick, “Google and Facebook among Tech Giants Theresa May Will Order to Remove Extremist Content,” The Independent, 2017, accessed October 23, 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/google-facebook-twitter-terrorism-extremist-content-theresa-may-remove-one-hour-a7956401.html; Heather Stewart and Jessica Elgot, “May Calls on Social Media Giants to Do More to Tackle Terrorism,” The Guardian, 2018, accessed October 23, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/24/theresa-may-calls-on-social-media-giants-to-do-more-to-tackle-terrorism; Nicholas Mairs, “Theresa May Calls on Social Media Firms to Take Down Christchurch Mosque Attack Video,” Politics Home, 2019, accessed October 23, 2019, https://www.politicshome.com/news/uk/home-affairs/terrorism/news/102546/theresa-may-calls-social-media-firms-take-down; Theresa May, “Theresa May’s Davos Address in Full,” World Economic Forum, January 25, 2018, accessed October 23, 2019, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/01/theresa-may-davos-address/.
49 European Commission, “The EU Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online,” undated, accessed October 23, 2019; European Commission, “Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on Preventing the Dissemination of Terrorist Content Online: A Contribution from the European Commission to the Leaders’ Meeting in Salzburg on 19–20 September 2018,” COM(2018) 640 final, September 12, 2018, , accessed October 23, 2019.
50 Facebook Community Standards, 2019, accessed October 23, 2019, https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/dangerous_individuals_organizations.
51 Alex Hern, “Facebook Bans Far-Right Groups, including BNP, EDL and Britain First,” The Guardian, 2019, accessed October 23, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/18/facebook-bans-far-right-groups-including-bnp-edl-and-britain-first.
53 “incite imminent lawless action” is the wording of the US Supreme Court in the case of Brandenburg vs. Ohio.
55 David Gilbert, “Gab is Back Online – and Already Flooded with Anti-Semitic Hate,” Vice, 2018, accessed January 31, 2020, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3k985y/gab-anti-semitism-pittsburgh-torba.
56 Audrey Alexander and William Braniff, “Marginalizing Violent Extremism Online,” Lawfare Blog, 2018, accessed October 23, 2019, https://www.lawfareblog.com/marginalizing-violent-extremism-online; Amy-Louise Watkin, “Considering the Whole Ecosystem in Regulating Terrorist Content and Hate online,” E-International Relations, 2019, accessed October 23, 2019, https://www.e-ir.info/2019/09/18/considering-the-whole-ecosystem-in-regulating-terrorist-content-and-hate-online/.
57 Bennett Clifford and Helen Powell, “De-Platforming and the Online Extremist’s Dilemma,” Lawfare Blog, 2019, accessed October 23, 2019, https://www.lawfareblog.com/de-platforming-and-online-extremists-dilemma; Audrey Alexander and William Braniff, “Marginalizing Violent Extremism Online,” Lawfare Blog, 2018, accessed October 23, 2019, https://www.lawfareblog.com/marginalizing-violent-extremism-online; Joe Whittaker, “How Content Removal Might Help Terrorists,” Lawfare Blog, 2019, accessed October 23, 2019, https://www.lawfareblog.com/how-content-removal-might-help-terrorists.
58 Bennett Clifford and Helen Powell, “De-Platforming and the Online Extremist’s Dilemma,” Lawfare Blog, 2019, accessed October 23, 2019, https://www.lawfareblog.com/de-platforming-and-online-extremists-dilemma.
59 Audrey Alexander and William Braniff, “Marginalizing Violent Extremism Online,” Lawfare Blog, 2018, accessed October 23, 2019, https://www.lawfareblog.com/marginalizing-violent-extremism-online.
60 Samantha Weirman and Audrey Alexander, “Hyperlinked Sympathizers: URLs and the Islamic State,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 43, no. 3 (2020): 239–57.
61 Mike Caulfield, “On the Importance of Taking Down Non-Violent Terrorist Content,” VOX-Pol Blog, 2019, accessed October 23, 2019, https://www.voxpol.eu/on-the-importance-of-taking-down-non-violent-terrorist-content/.
62 Ruth Wodak, “‘Anything Goes!’ – The Haiderization of Europe,” in Right-Wing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse, ed. Ruth Wodak, Majid KhosraviNik, and Brigitte Mral (New York: A&C Black, 2013), 23–38; John E. Richardson and Monica Colombo, “Race and Immigration in Far-and Extreme-Right European Political Leaflets,” Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies (2014): 521–42.
63 Nicole Doerr, “Bridging Language Barriers, Bonding against Immigrants: A Visual Case Study of Transnational Network Publics Created by Far-Right Activists in Europe,” Discourse & Society 28, no. 1 (2017): 3–23.
64 Monika Bednarek and Helen Caple, “‘Value Added’: Language, Image and News Values,” Discourse, Context & Media 1, no. 2–3 (2012): 103–113; Helen Caple and Monika Bednarek, “Delving into the Discourse: Approaches to News Values in Journalism Studies and Beyond,” (2013); Monika Bednarek and Helen Caple, The Discourse of News Values: How News Organizations Create Newsworthiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
65 See e.g., Helen Caple, Photojournalism: A Social Semiotic Approach (New York: Springer, 2013); Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Philippa Smith, “The Visual Construction of Political Crises,” Crisis and the Media: Narratives of Crisis across Cultural Settings and Media Genres 76 (2018): 151.
66 See e.g., Stuart Macdonald and Nuria Lorenzo-Dus, “Visual Jihad: Constructing the “Good Muslim” in Online Jihadist Magazines,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism (2018): 1–23.; Amy-Louise Watkin and Seán Looney, “ “The Lions of Tomorrow”: A News Value Analysis of Child Images in Jihadi Magazines,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 42, no. 1–2 (2019): 120–40.
67 Monika Bednarek and Helen Caple, “‘Value Added’: Language, Image and News Values,” Discourse, Context & Media 1, no. 2–3 (2012): 103–13; Helen Caple and Monika Bednarek, “Delving into the Discourse: Approaches to News Values in Journalism Studies and Beyond,” (2013); Monika Bednarek and Helen Caple, The Discourse of News Values: How News Organizations Create Newsworthiness (Oxford University Press, 2017).
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid.
70 Helen Caple, Photojournalism: A Social Semiotic Approach (Springer, 2013).
71 Monika Bednarek and Helen Caple, “‘Value Added’: Language, Image and News Values,” Discourse, Context & Media 1, no. 2–3 (2012): 103–13.
72 John Thornton Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (Rutgers University Press, 1995); Nuria Lorenzo-Dus, Television Discourse: Analysing Language in the Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
73 Paul Messaris, Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising (Sage, 1997).
74 Ruth Wodak, The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean (London: Sage, 2015); Andrew Brindle and Corrie MacMillan, “Like & Share If You Agree: A Study of Discourses and Cyber Activism of the Far-Right British Nationalist Party Britain First,” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 5, no. 1 (2017): 108–133; Lella Nouri and Nuria Lorenzo-Dus, “Investigating Reclaim Australia and Britain First’s Use of Social Media: Developing a New Model of Imagined Political Communities Online,” Journal for Deradicalization 18 (2019): 1–37; Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Lella Nouri, “The Discourse of the US Alt-Right Online–A Case Study of the Traditionalist Worker Party Blog,” Critical Discourse Studies (2020): 1-19
75 BBC, “Britain First Leader and Deputy Leader Jailed for Hate Crimes,” BBC, 2018, accessed February 1, 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-43320121.
76 Audrey Alexander and William Braniff, “Marginalizing Violent Extremism Online,” Lawfare Blog., 2018, accessed October 23, 2019, https://www.lawfareblog.com/marginalizing-violent-extremism-online.