Eugenics arguments abound in white nationalist abortion discourse
According to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, nonwhites, globalists and elites are plotting to eliminate the white race and its dominance through anti-white policies and increased immigration. In that context, abortion among white women is perceived by white nationalists (WN) as a betrayal of their ‘biological’ and ‘traditional’ gender role – procreation of white babies. While WN condemn abortion among white women as a murderous sin, at times they encourage the practice among nonwhites to solve demographic threats to white dominance. In this study, we use mixed methods, combining unsupervised machine learning with close textual analysis of 30,725 posts including the term ‘abortion’ published on the WN website Stormfront between 2001 and 2017. We identify three broad themes: White genocide, focused on the conspiracy theory and detailing the active actors in its alleged execution; political, focused on political agendas and laws; and WN reproductive reasoning, articulating and justifying the contradiction between supporting abortion for nonwhites but not for whites via politics of difference that emphasize nonwhites’ supposed inferior morality. We discuss WN’s unique and explicitly racist discourse around a medical topic like abortion, a staple of the conservative and religious right for decades, and how it is used to alleviate their cognitive dissonance resulting from their dual-stance on abortion. Such discourse could be harnessed to recruit members into the movement and normalize extreme, racist ideologies
Anti-vaccine sentiment strong among white nationalists - with some predictable exceptions
Research has indicated a growing resistance to vaccines among U.S. conservatives and Republicans. Following past successes of the far-right in mainstreaming health misinformation, this study tracks almost two decades of vaccine discourse on the extremist, white nationalist (WN) online message-board Stormfront. This mixed-methods approach combines unsupervised machine learning of 8892 posts including the term “vaccin*“, published on Stormfront between 2001 and 2017. Four themes were identified: conspiracies, science, race and white innovation. The prominence of themes over time was relatively stable.
As with past health-related conspiracy theories, high levels of anti-vaccine sentiment in online far-right sociotechnical information systems could threaten public health, especially if it ‘spills-over’ to mainstream media. Many pro-vaccine arguments on the forum relied on racist, WN reasoning, thus preventing the authors from recommending the use of these unethical arguments in future public health communications.
Copyright law is relational, as discovered through interviews with music therapists
This study offers new insights into (1) sharing health-related information on social media, (2) copyright gatekeeper motivations, and (3) the emotional injury for improper takedowns of online content. Through 18 in-depth interviews, we investigate music therapists’ copyright-comfort-zone. In music therapy, using patient-preferred music yields superior therapeutic results: The rub is that patient-preferred music is often copyrighted music. Therapists are comfortable using copyrighted music in private therapy sessions, but copyright concerns arise when recorded artifacts from therapy are shared online. Social media affordances permit sharing of therapeutic artifacts outside the private therapy bubble. Notwithstanding the desire and affordances to share therapeutic artifacts online, our results show that music therapists discourage social media sharing. Music therapists act as copyright gatekeepers not only to avoid legal liability, but also to forestall emotional harm to patients and families should these artifacts be subject to an online takedown notice. Our findings inform a more nuanced framework for understanding copyright’s influence on sharing digital artifacts.