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Decoding the Alt-Right

Analyzing Online Toxicity on Social Media

Simon Roth1 & Fabio Votta2
2018-20-08

1 E-Mail: nomis.roth@gmx.com
2 E-Mail: fabio.votta@gmail.com


Slides: https://decoding-the-altright.netlify.com/

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What is the Alt-Right?

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Non-ironic Nazism masquerading as ironic Nazism.

~Andrew Anglin, Founder of the The Daily Stormer

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What is the Alt-Right?

A group of loosely aligned individuals and subgroups that predominately consist of white, young & male frequent internet user. Although adherence to these beliefs varies, these are some common themes within the Alt-Right:

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What is the Alt-Right?

A group of loosely aligned individuals and subgroups that predominately consist of white, young & male frequent internet user. Although adherence to these beliefs varies, these are some common themes within the Alt-Right:

  • Antipathy towards both liberals (“social justice warriors”) and conservatives (“cuckservatives”)
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What is the Alt-Right?

A group of loosely aligned individuals and subgroups that predominately consist of white, young & male frequent internet user. Although adherence to these beliefs varies, these are some common themes within the Alt-Right:

  • Antipathy towards both liberals (“social justice warriors”) and conservatives (“cuckservatives”)

  • Fighting a "culture war" against perceived liberal consensus within the establishment

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What is the Alt-Right?

A group of loosely aligned individuals and subgroups that predominately consist of white, young & male frequent internet user. Although adherence to these beliefs varies, these are some common themes within the Alt-Right:

  • Antipathy towards both liberals (“social justice warriors”) and conservatives (“cuckservatives”)

  • Fighting a "culture war" against perceived liberal consensus within the establishment

  • Belief that freedom of speech is being threatened by "political correctness"

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What is the Alt-Right?

A group of loosely aligned individuals and subgroups that predominately consist of white, young & male frequent internet user. Although adherence to these beliefs varies, these are some common themes within the Alt-Right:

  • Antipathy towards both liberals (“social justice warriors”) and conservatives (“cuckservatives”)

  • Fighting a "culture war" against perceived liberal consensus within the establishment

  • Belief that freedom of speech is being threatened by "political correctness"

  • Strong animosity towards feminism, multiculturalism and immigration ("cultural marxism")

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What is the Alt-Right?

A group of loosely aligned individuals and subgroups that predominately consist of white, young & male frequent internet user. Although adherence to these beliefs varies, these are some common themes within the Alt-Right:

  • Antipathy towards both liberals (“social justice warriors”) and conservatives (“cuckservatives”)

  • Fighting a "culture war" against perceived liberal consensus within the establishment

  • Belief that freedom of speech is being threatened by "political correctness"

  • Strong animosity towards feminism, multiculturalism and immigration ("cultural marxism")

  • Belief in biological differences in between races and genders that justifies separate treatment

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What is the Alt-Right?

A group of loosely aligned individuals and subgroups that predominately consist of white, young & male frequent internet user. Although adherence to these beliefs varies, these are some common themes within the Alt-Right:

  • Antipathy towards both liberals (“social justice warriors”) and conservatives (“cuckservatives”)

  • Fighting a "culture war" against perceived liberal consensus within the establishment

  • Belief that freedom of speech is being threatened by "political correctness"

  • Strong animosity towards feminism, multiculturalism and immigration ("cultural marxism")

  • Belief in biological differences in between races and genders that justifies separate treatment

  • Ambiguous and troll-like behavior as to ensure plausible deniability

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What is the Alt-Right?

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What is the Alt-Right?

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What is the Alt-Right?

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What is the Alt-Right?

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What is the Alt-Right?

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What is the Alt-Right?

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What is the Alt-Right?

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Data Collection

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What data did we collect?

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What data did we collect?

  • Text data from three Platforms: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube
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What data did we collect?

  • Text data from three Platforms: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube
  • Comments from 36 Alt-Right connected profiles/YouTube channels
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What data did we collect?

  • Text data from three Platforms: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube

  • Comments from 36 Alt-Right connected profiles/YouTube channels

  • Comments from 6 Media Outlets (CNN, MSNBC, ABC, Fox News, Washington Post, New York Times)

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What data did we collect?

  • Text data from three Platforms: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube

  • Comments from 36 Alt-Right connected profiles/YouTube channels

  • Comments from 6 Media Outlets (CNN, MSNBC, ABC, Fox News, Washington Post, New York Times)

  • Comments from the entire year 2017
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What data did we collect?

  • Text data from three Platforms: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube

  • Comments from 36 Alt-Right connected profiles/YouTube channels

  • Comments from 6 Media Outlets (CNN, MSNBC, ABC, Fox News, Washington Post, New York Times)

  • Comments from the entire year 2017

  • In total over 30 million comments/tweets

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Who did we scrape? Alt-Right

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Who did we scrape? - Media

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Language Modeling: Toxicity

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Language Predictions

Data

  • Cooperation between Wikipedia and Jigsaw
  • Five thousand crowd-workers were involved
  • Approx. 160k comments annotated with toxicity scores
  • The dataset is documented here.

Machine Learning

  • Balanced data to 30.000
  • Text Normalization
  • Different Keras Models (Accuracy ~90%)
  • Prediction scores (toxicity) for each comment in the entire corpus
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User Activity Types

How do Media and Alt-Right interact online?

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Differentiating between User Activity Types

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Shared Active Users: Alt-Right Profiles and Media Outlets

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Multilevel Logit Regression:

Random Intercept (User Audience) and random slope for Altright/Media

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The Flow of Toxicity

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Average Toxicity by Day


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Content Analysis

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Multilevel Logit Regression:

Random Intercept (User Audience) and random slope for Racial Mentionings

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Most Frequent Bigram Network - Muslims

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Conclusions

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Conclusions

  • Alt-Right pages exhibit much greater levels of toxicity than Media equivalents
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Conclusions

  • Alt-Right pages exhibit much greater levels of toxicity than Media equivalents
  • Alt-Right toxicity spikes on days of major Terror attacks and events like "March Against Sharia" or Charlottesville
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Conclusions

  • Alt-Right pages exhibit much greater levels of toxicity than Media equivalents

  • Alt-Right toxicity spikes on days of major Terror attacks and events like "March Against Sharia" or Charlottesville

  • There is a good share of users that comment both on Alt-Right and Media pages

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Conclusions

  • Alt-Right pages exhibit much greater levels of toxicity than Media equivalents

  • Alt-Right toxicity spikes on days of major Terror attacks and events like "March Against Sharia" or Charlottesville

  • There is a good share of users that comment both on Alt-Right and Media pages

  • Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson share a considerable user base with each other as well as with Fox News and CNN

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Conclusions

  • Alt-Right pages exhibit much greater levels of toxicity than Media equivalents

  • Alt-Right toxicity spikes on days of major Terror attacks and events like "March Against Sharia" or Charlottesville

  • There is a good share of users that comment both on Alt-Right and Media pages

  • Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson share a considerable user base with each other as well as with Fox News and CNN

  • Highest levels of toxicity on Media pages are from polarized Alt-Right users

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Conclusions

  • Alt-Right pages exhibit much greater levels of toxicity than Media equivalents

  • Alt-Right toxicity spikes on days of major Terror attacks and events like "March Against Sharia" or Charlottesville

  • There is a good share of users that comment both on Alt-Right and Media pages

  • Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson share a considerable user base with each other as well as with Fox News and CNN

  • Highest levels of toxicity on Media pages are from polarized Alt-Right users

  • On Alt-Right pages, polarized Media users are almost as toxic as Alt-Right users

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Conclusions

  • Alt-Right pages exhibit much greater levels of toxicity than Media equivalents

  • Alt-Right toxicity spikes on days of major Terror attacks and events like "March Against Sharia" or Charlottesville

  • There is a good share of users that comment both on Alt-Right and Media pages

  • Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson share a considerable user base with each other as well as with Fox News and CNN

  • Highest levels of toxicity on Media pages are from polarized Alt-Right users

  • On Alt-Right pages, polarized Media users are almost as toxic as Alt-Right users

  • Polarized Alt-Right users use much more toxic language when talking about Immigrants, Black people and Muslims

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Thanks for Listening!

Slides: https://decoding-the-altright.netlify.com/

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References

Hawley, G. (2017). Making Sense of the Alt-right. Columbia University Press.

Marwick, A., & Lewis, R. (2017). Media manipulation and disinformation online. New York: Data & Society Research Institute.

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Appendix

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Milo Yiannopolous' characterization of the Alt-Right: 1

The alt-right is a movement born out of the youthful, subversive, underground edges of the internet. 4chan and 8chan are hubs of alt-right activity. For years, members of these forums – political and non-political – have delighted in attention-grabbing, juvenile pranks. Long before the alt-right, 4channers turned trolling the national media into an in-house sport.

Marwick and Lewis 2017

Term coined by Richard Spencer to describe a version of white nationalism that positions itself as comprised of younger, wealthier, and better-educated individuals than traditional white supremacist groups like the Klu Klux Klan. Deeply entwined with social media and staples of internet culture, like memes. Believes that “political correctness” threatens individual liberty. Example: Jared Taylor of the American Renaissance, Mike Cernovich of Danger and Play.

Hawley 2017

Using the loosest definition, we could say the Alt-Right includes anyone with right-wing sensibilities that rejects the mainstream conservative movement. But there are certain common, perhaps universal attitudes within the Alt-Right. The Alt-Right is fundamentally concerned with race. At its core, the Alt-Right is a white-nationalist movement, even if many (perhaps most) of the people who identify with the Alt-Right do not care for that term. The most energetic and significant figures of the movement want to see the creation of a white ethnostate in North America.

1Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” Breitbart, March 29, 2016, http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/.

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Appendix: Total Number of Posts and Comments: Alt-Right


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Appendix: Text Predictions

Model Performances

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Appendix: Explainability I

Communist control freak engineered scum situation this attack proves it's all organized ahead of time

Shoot dat nigga amp his shorty bitch shorty bitch

VICESports it past your bed time No wonder no one reads that garbage on vice because faggots like you write shit fuck off

Get the fuck outta here talking bout the response will be better You fucking ignorant stupid asshole

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Appendix: Explainability II

word glove lstm gru multi stacked grucnn ngram
Communist
0.607
0.98
0.926
0.969
0.948
0.928
 Communist control freak
control
0.584
0.89
0.925
0.911
0.912
0.633
 control freak engineered
freak
0.61
0.994
0.98
0.999
0.989
0.995
 freak engineered scum
engineered
0.554
0.955
0.978
0.997
0.974
0.973
 engineered scum situation
scum
0.537
0.945
0.973
0.995
0.974
0.972
 scum situation this
situation
0.519
0.159
0.066
0.311
0.253
0.27
 situation this attack
this
0.536
0.107
0.071
0.179
0.339
0.267
 this attack proves
attack
0.557
0.144
0.073
0.113
0.348
0.294
 attack proves it's
proves
0.572
0.38
0.111
0.067
0.33
0.707
 proves it's all
it's
0.546
0.309
0.068
0.126
0.204
0.07
 it's all organized
all
0.558
0.142
0.07
0.105
0.187
0.027
 all organized ahead
organized
0.512
0.039
0.062
0.031
0.169
0.009
 organized ahead of
ahead
0.54
0.055
0.068
0.036
0.264
0.14
 ahead of time
of
0.524
0.189
0.068
0.094
0.35
0.193
 of
time
0.528
0.17
0.073
0.03
0.314
0.159
 time
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Appendix: Nullmodel

Random Intercept (User Audience)

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Appendix: Most Frequent Bigram Network - Jews

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Appendix: Most Frequent Bigram Network - Migrants

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What is the Alt-Right?

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