Extreme Identities: A Linguistic and Visual Analysis of European Far-Right Online Communities’ Politics of Identity (ExId)

Over the past years, policy-makers and intelligence professionals have witness a dramatic multiplication of websites promoting extreme-right wing ideas and grassroots organizations. This growth of what we can call the ‘far-right online ecosystem’ has been so fast that academics and not-academic practitioners have struggled to keep track of its development. The Extreme Identities (‘ExId’) project harnesses cutting-edge computational tools to map the entire ecosystem, identifying its websites, uncovering how they connect to each other, and measuring their respective popularity.

Hosted in three of the most dynamic hubs for research on extremist communications (Trinity College Dublin, University of Copenhagen, University of Exeter), the team will also scrape the linguistic and visual content of these thousands of platforms, in an effort to constitute the largest database of far-right material to date. This big dataset will be used to expose how the many far-right online communities, through their choices of language and visual imagery, make some socio-political issues salient and construct particular collective identities (both of themselves and their ‘enemies’).