Sharing the hate? Memes and transnationality in the far right’s digital visual culture

ABSTRACT

Current research on visual media and the far right creates two expectations: that memes play an increasingly salient role in the far right’s digital visual culture, and that the visual and participatory dimensions of internet culture facilitate greater transnationality. We explore these expectations with a comparative research design, situating memes in relation to other genres of visual content and across different country contexts. Taking a mixed methods approach, this article examines the digital visual culture of 25 far-right alternative media and other non-party organisations in Australia, Italy, Germany, and the United States. We assess the salience of memes and other visual genres, as well as three forms of transnationality: the circulation of images, direct communicative references, and transnational similarities. Unexpectedly, we find that memes play only a limited role in the digital visual culture of far-right non-party organisations, with their uneven concentration in Anglophone alt-media suggesting the potential pitfalls of assumptions about ‘global’ internet culture. We also find little evidence of transnationality through the circulation of the same visuals across countries, whether memes or other genres. Instead, transnationality works through transnational references within the images themselves and through more parallel practices of reproducing visuals in similar ways with similar themes, but with elements specific to an organisation’s national and political context. Within this, we identify three distinct visual discourses – fascist continuity, western civilisational identity, and pop cultural appropriation – which highlight different practices of transnationality and collective identity construction within the far right online.

KEYWORDS:

• Memes
• visual culture
• critical visual analysis
• far right
• transnationality
• collective identity

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank David Rouhani for his excellent work in assisting with quantitative coding and codebook development.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The far right is here operationalised as a heterogeneous political family which share an ideological core of nativism and authoritarianism (Mudde, 2007).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research [grant number 16DII114].

Notes on contributors

Jordan McSwiney

Jordan McSwiney is a PhD candidate in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on political parties and the far right, with an interest in their ideology, organising practices and use of technology [email: [email protected]].

Michael Vaughan

Michael Vaughan is a postdoctoral researcher in the research group Digitalization and the Transnational Public Sphere at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, Berlin, where he researches digital political communication and participation [email: [email protected]].

Annett Heft

Annett Heft is head of the research group Digitalization and the Transnational Public Sphere at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, Berlin, and senior researcher at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. Her main fields of research are the comparative study of political communication in Europe with a focus on digital public spheres, right-wing communication infrastructures, transnational communication and cross-border journalism as well as quantitative research methods and computational social science [email: [email protected]].

Matthias Hoffmann

Matthias Hoffmann is a postdoctoral researcher in the research group Digitalisation and the Transnational Public Sphere at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, Berlin. He researches digital communication and collective action with a focus on far-right actors [email: [email protected]].