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White Genocide, Ethnocrisis, and Far-Right Identity Politics: Constructing White Nationalist Identity Through Twitter Discourse
University of California, Davis.
Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Peace and Conflict Research.ORCID iD: 0009-0004-0172-9992
2025 (English)In: Oxford Intersections: Social Media in Society and Culture / [ed] Laeeq Khan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025Chapter in book (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

Collective identity is not a static construct; it grows and changes as the world changes around it. This article approaches identity as a discursive construct that takes shape through words and concepts with shared meanings among a community of knowers. Specifically, the analysis focuses on white nationalist discourse on Twitter to expose the emergence of a far-right identity politics, which appropriates the rhetoric of left politics, which traditionally advocates for marginalized groups. By constructing narratives around ethnocrisis to reflect concurrent efforts by liberals to de-center whiteness in politics and culture more broadly, white nationalists have leveraged digital publics to position white people, particularly white men, as an oppressed class, dispossessed of social and cultural agency. To examine and illustrate its conceptual and discursive characteristics, a digital ethnography of white nationalist discourse is conducted by combining computational and qualitative methods on a dataset comprising 146,210 Twitter users and 211 million utterances from 2014 to 2017. Using a frequency-based method of lexicon extraction, a large and comprehensive set of terms associated with white nationalism is generated and manually classified into thematic categories representing the conceptual space of white nationalist identity. This “imaginative geography” highlights new developments in the political movement of white supremacy as well as enduring themes from its earlier manifestations. By integrating quantitative and qualitative analytical paradigms, this article underscores the utility of social media as a particularly accessible site for discourse analysis and identity construction.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025.
Keywords [en]
white nationalism, identity politics, computational social science, collective identity, imaginative geographies, Twitter, discourse analysis, radicalization, digital ethnography, natural language processing
National Category
Sociology (Excluding Social Work, Social Anthropology, Demography and Criminology) Media and Communication Studies
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-562382DOI: 10.1093/9780198945253.003.0064ISBN: 9780198945253 (electronic)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:uu-562382DiVA, id: diva2:1978365
Available from: 2025-06-27 Created: 2025-06-27 Last updated: 2025-11-25Bibliographically approved

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Lanigan, Amanda

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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
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Output format
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