‘Welcome to #GabFam’: Far-right virtual community on Gab
Jasser, Greta;
McSwiney, Jordan;
Pertwee, Ed;
Zannettou, Savvas;
(2021)
‘Welcome to #GabFam’: Far-right virtual community on Gab.
New Media and Society, 25 (7).
pp. 1728-1745.
ISSN 1461-4448
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211024546
Permanent Identifier
Use this Digital Object Identifier when citing or linking to this resource.
With large social media platforms coming under increasing pressure to deplatform far-right users, the Alternative Technology movement (Alt-Tech) emerged as a new digital support infrastructure for the far right. We conduct a qualitative analysis of the prominent Alt-Tech platform Gab, a social networking service primarily modelled on Twitter, to assess the far-right virtual community on the platform. We find Gab’s technological affordances – including its lack of content moderation, culture of anonymity, microblogging architecture and funding model – have fostered an ideologically eclectic far-right community united by fears of persecution at the hands of ‘Big Tech’. We argue that this points to the emergence of a novel techno-social victimology as an axis of far-right virtual community, wherein shared experiences or fears of being deplatformed facilitate a coalescing of assorted far-right tendencies online.
Description: This is an author accepted manuscript version of an article accepted for publication, and following peer review. Please be aware that minor differences may exist between this version and the final version if you wish to cite from it.
Licence: Creative Commons: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0