Social Media Use of Far-Right Political Parties and Right-Wing Extremist Movements: A Comparative Mixed Methods Research on Twitter

Abstract

This research aims to explore and answer the question: how does the use of Twitter by far-right political parties differ from right-wing extremist movements in terms of their choice of topic and their use of language? Right-wing online extremism is becoming increasingly more relevant, particularly after the 2019 Christchurch attacks, in which the perpetrator seems to have been inspired by consuming significant amounts of online content. Following from Klein and Muis's research from 2018 regarding followers of right-wing extremist movements and far-right political parties, hypotheses were formulated. It was expected that right-wing extremist movements would tend to mostly discuss Islam and immigration topics, while far-right political parties would mostly focus on the national and European establishment. Moreover, it was expected that right-wing extremist movements would use more extreme language than the followers of political parties. One party and one movement from three different countries - the Netherlands, United Kingdom and Germany - have been selected. The selected groups are PVV, UKIP, AfD, IV, EDL and Pegida. A mixed methods approach to research was adopted in which the findings of the quantitative statistical analysis were complemented with and enriched by qualitative research methods,...