Exploiting white fear continues to galvanize voters
In a new opinion piece in Scientific American, CITAP faculty Daniel Kreiss, Alice Marwick, and Francesca Tripodi describe how political campaigns against critical race theory (CRT) continue a long tradition of linking racial justice movements to communism as a form of fearmongering. They conclude that effectively countering this disinformation campaign requires going beyond dismissals anti-CRT rhetoric as inaccurate to affirmatively supporting racial justice lessons in classrooms as a matter of equality and justice.
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
Uncovering the tactics of anti-immigration YouTube - and tools to fight back
Define American recently released a new report, “’Immigration Will Destroy Us’ and Other Talking Points.” It describes how popular anti-immigration YouTube videos frame the issue and their influence on offline conversations and perceptions. One section, co-authored by Francesca Tripodi, Shauna Siggelkow, and Sarah E. Lowe, analyzed the content of the 23 most-watched videos with anti-immigration messages and documented how they promote their narrative. Many of the videos promote the Great Replacement Theory narrative, a white nationalist theory that believes white genocide is imminent. Due to how frequently this narrative appears in the videos, researchers named the network of channels that publish these videos the Great Replacement Network (GRN).
Most of this content comes from a very small number of creators, and two of the three most prominent channels are also the largest anti-immigrant organizations in the United States.
These channels attack and instill fear about legal immigrants (Muslims) and illegal immigrants (Latine). The tactics they use to persuade include:
- Calls to logic and common sense (“trust me, I’ve done the research”)
- Appeals to fear
- Malinformation, or true statistics or data taken out of context to support false conclusions
The report reveals how YouTube influences immigration attitudes among key demographics, and the alarming sway the GRN holds (they have over 100 million views). Define American shares this research in the hope that content creators and similar groups can use this research to counter this narrative and tell positive stories for immigrants online, debunking each of the GRN’s claims one YouTube video at a time.