Decentering communication studies' historic reliance on white perspectives and epistemologies
This review articles examines three books that place race and ethnicity at the center of their disparate approaches. What is theoretically important about all three books is that they start from an emphasis on the analytical and empirical importance of those who stand outside of powerful institutions and dominant cultures, whether they are activists, movements, counterpublics, everyday smartphone and social media users, or generations of people with a shared history. Each of the books has a different analytical lens onto what brings and keeps these people together, and the relations they hold to others and across history.
Right-leaning outlets reach more people - even within the confines of online activist networks built to enact change and oppose dominant ideologies
We analyze social media activity during one of the largest protest mobilizations in US history to examine ideological asymmetries in the posting of news content. Using an unprecedented combination of four datasets (tracking offline protests, social media activity, web browsing, and the reliability of news sources), we show that there is no evidence of unreliable sources having any prominent visibility during the protest period, but we do identify asymmetries in the ideological slant of the sources shared on social media, with a clear bias towards right-leaning domains. These results support the “amplification of the right” thesis, which points to the structural conditions (social and technological) that lead to higher visibility of content with a partisan bent towards the right. Our findings provide evidence that right-leaning sources gain more visibility on social media and reveal that ideological asymmetries manifest themselves even in the context of movements with progressive goals.
Existing research suggests that left- and right-wing activists use different media to achieve their political goals: the former operate on social media through hashtag activism, and the latter partner with partisan outlets. However, legacy and digital media are not parallel universes. Sharing mainstream news in social media offers one prominent conduit for content spillover across channels. We analyze news sharing during a historically massive racial justice mobilization and show that misinformation posed no challenge to the coverage of these events. However, links to outlets with a partisan bent towards the right were shared more frequently, which suggests that right-leaning outlets have higher reach even within the confines of online activist networks built to enact change and oppose dominant ideologies.
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