Abstract
News sharing on social media is ubiquitous and extends across demographics, platforms, and political ideologies. Online far-right communities are no exception, with a barrage of embedded news stories populating the social media feeds of far-right users. This has potentially profound implications for liberal democracy, especially given the propensity for far-right communities to spread disinformation via ‘fake news’. Yet, we do not know enough about how news content is embedded into far-right discourses, nor the extent to which the practice may contribute to the digital transmission of far-right ideologies. Accordingly, this paper investigates how far-right communities share news media to promulgate illiberalism on social media platforms. The paper aims to uncover the dominant discursive devices deployed to integrate news media reports into far-right discourses. To achieve this aim, this paper applies critical discourse analysis alongside conceptualisations of legitimacy and far-right ideology to an original dataset of social media posts in an Australian context. It finds that news sharing in far-right online circles may legitimise and reify far-right ideology through the juxtaposition of mainstream news media indicating the validity of far-right grievances. The paper also introduces a prototype model of news sharing legitimisation.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 39-55 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| Journal | Information, Communication & Society |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 30 Jan 2023 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2024 |
Keywords
- Far-right
- social media
- legitimacy
- critical discourse analysis
- political communication