European and American Extreme Right Groups and the Internet

Manuela Caiani, Linda Parenti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409409618
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317139805
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Essays in Politics & International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How do right-wing extremist organizations throughout the world use the Internet as a tool for communication and recruitment? What is its role in identity-building within radical right-wing groups and how do they use the Internet to set their agenda, build contacts, spread their ideology and encourage mobilization? This important contribution to the field of Internet politics adopts a social movement perspective to address and examine these important questions. Conducting a comparative content analysis of more than 500 extreme right organizational web sites from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, it offers an overview of the Internet communication activities of these groups and systematically maps and analyses the links and structure of the virtual communities of the extreme right. Based on reports from the daily press the book presents a protest event analysis of right wing groups' mobilisation and action strategies, relating them to their online practices. In doing so it exposes the new challenges and opportunities the Internet presents to the groups themselves and the societies in which they exist.

Chapter 1
Extreme Right Organizations and the Internet: An Introduction

We commonly look at the Internet as a crucial modern tool for the development of a ‘global village’, diffusion of information, communication and equality among citizens, global thinking and universalism. It has further raised hopes about its effects on democracy in societies, and in particular on the role of civil society and its organizations. However, it is also evident that the Internet has a dark side, which is not widely explored.

How and how much do right-wing extremist organizations throughout the world use the Internet as a tool for communication and recruitment? What is the potential role of the Internet for the identity-building process of right-wing groups, and how does the use of the Internet influence their mobilization and action strategies? How do right-wing radical groups utilize the Internet to set their agenda, build contacts with other extremist groups, spread their ideology and encourage mobilization?

In this volume, we try to answer these questions, locating the complex relationship between extreme right groups and the Internet in a broader scenario of new challenges and opportunities provided by new technologies to civil society organizations (Mosca 2007). Indeed, whereas the use of the Internet to conduct politics is a well-known and much-studied phenomenon mainly concerning left-wing social movements (e.g. the anti-globalization movement, the Zapatista movement, etc.), or concerning institutionalized political actors (such as institutions and political parties), so far, little scientific attention has been devoted to the extreme right and the Internet. Furthermore, there is no systematic comparative analysis on how the extreme right uses the Web infrastructure in different countries. On the descriptive level, we must note that the current debate on the potential role of the Internet for right-wing organizations is characterized by much theoretical speculation on the basis of scarce and fragmented empirical evidence. We know little about how and to what extent extreme right groups use the Internet for their political communication and mobilization.

This book aims to fill this gap. By conducting a systematic comparative analysis of different types of right-wing organizations in Europe and the United States and mixing qualitative and quantitative research techniques, it systematically explores the role of the Internet for the construction of identity of right-wing organizations as well as for influencing their mobilization, organizational contacts and action strategies.

In order to empirically investigate these different aspects of the potential role of the Internet for extremist groups, this research employs three methods. It uses social network analysis, based on online links between right-wing organizations, to investigate the organizational and potential mobilizational structure of the right-wing milieu. It conducts a comparative formalized content analysis of websites operated by radical right-wing organizations in order to address the communicative dimension of right-wing radicalism through the Internet. Websites may indeed be considered as “combinations of technologies, actors, and types of actions yielding different emerging structures of online civic participation” (Bruszt et al. 2005: 151). The aim of this part of the study is to trace the specific use of the Internet for diffusing propaganda, promoting ‘virtual communities’ of debate, raising funds, and for organizing and mobilizing political campaigns. It performs a protest event analysis of the daily press in the last five years (2005–2009) in order to observe the recent evolution of the ‘offline’ mobilization and repertoires of action of right-wing groups, linking them to their online practices. Finally, a consultation of government and watchdog sources and far right documents allow us to reconstruct the context of right-wing mobilization, both online and offline.

The analysis focuses both on right-wing political parties and on non-party organizations, even violent groups, in six selected countries: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, for a total of 556 groups. Our main goal is to analyze and explain differences between different types of right-wing organizations and different countries, against the background of the political, cultural and ‘technological opportunities’ in the offline sphere. Indeed, we assume that different processes of radicalization using the Internet may be adopted by different types of groups in various political and cultural contexts.

In this chapter, after defining the main concepts (including right-wing extremist groups and cyberactivism), we shall discuss some main hypotheses from the literature on political mobilization and social movements, but also from research on media and political communication studies (political activism and CMC, computer mediated communication and ICTs (information communication technologies), within which this research on extreme right groups and the Internet can be located: in particular the influence of the political, cultural and technological ‘opportunity structures’, offered by the national contexts in which these groups operate and the characteristics of different types of right-wing organizations. Additionally, we will discuss the role of the Internet for right-wing groups within different approaches to political mobilization and political violence and terrorism, as well as in the context of theories on the democratic potential of Internet. We shall continue the chapter by describing the research methods and the empirical material (sources) on which this book is based and we will conclude with an overview of the content of the volume.

Cyberactivism and Democracy

Internet politics, cyberactivism, or online activism, can be broadly defined as the use of electronic communication technologies for various forms of ‘politically oriented’ activism, namely an activism in the civic political sphere through the Internet (Vegh 2003: 71). In fact, cyberactivism “crosses disciplines, mixes theories with practical activist approaches, and represents a broad range of online activist strategies, from online awareness campaigns to Internet-transmitted laser-projected messaging” (McCaughey and Ayers 2003: 2).

Ever since social scientists began exploring the role of the Internet in politics, about a decade ago, the debate has focused on many effects of the Internet on society, especially its influence on participation and pluralism (Mosca 2007: 1). The transformative potential of new information and interactive technologies has been often referred to by the first wave of enthusiasts (e.g. Ayres 1999; Meyers 2001; Norris 2001) as able to open “a new era of an expanded and vibrant global civil society.” In order to refer to the (new) interactions between citizens and politics in the era of electronics, new terms have been introduced, such as e-participation (i.e. the formulation of political opinion online), e-governance (i.e. the online access to information and public services), e-voting and e-referendum (i.e. the possibility to participate in online elections) (Cotta et al. 2004: 254–258), and above all e-democracy (della Porta and Mosca 2005a), defined as the growth in the opportunities for citizens’ political participation as a result of the Internet (Rose 2005). Optimistic commentators on the new technologies have stressed several positive effects arising from them, such as their capacity to overcome the one-to-many character of the once-dominant mass media in favor of unmediated connections among the new global citizens, as well as their potential to “revive a dormant public sphere by creating new networked spaces for participation and de-territorialized domains for deliberation” (Bruszt et al. 2005: 149).

In particular, it has been argued that new ICTs and especially the Internet would encourage citizens alienated from institutions of representative democracy to become involved in new types of political activities and to become re-engaged with traditional forms of participation (Russo and Smets 2012). Indeed as a new means of communication, these technologies would provide a larger portion of the population with information on politics which had previously been limited to the few, thereby improving the possibilities for the public to become more interested in politics and consequently more engaged in it (ibid.). The presence of self-managed resources, such as the websites, might also reduce the ‘filtering’ function of journalists on political issues.

Today we have thousands of NGOs, organized social movements, lobby groups and political activists who make use of the Internet for their activities (Axford and Huggins 2001: 75). Cyberspace is indeed becoming a vital link and meeting ground for civil society organizations and political collective actors, fostering the emergence of “multiple mini-public spheres” (ibid.: 75). Moreover, as for democracy ‘from below’, it is stressed by scholars that the ICTs also “create strategic innovation … that could not so easily have been made in an offline environment” (Coleman and Blumler 2009: 119). Indeed, contrary to ‘passive consumers’ or voters in the mass communication democracies, “the global cybercitizen wouldbe a user as producer, contributing to online debates and interacting directly with others” (Bruszt et al. 2005: 150).

Regarding the participation in politics, the Internet would therefore allow an expansion of not only the ‘users’, but also of the producers of (political) information, increasing the channels of participation. Being horizontal, bidirectional and interactive, communication via the Internet should reduce hierarchies, by increasing participation from below (Warkentin 2001). Indeed during the debates among citizens within the cyber-sphere social relations of solidarity can be consolidated and the interest for the community reinforced (della Porta and Mosca 2005a).

In addition, as noted, by increasing the channels of information available to citizens, and facilitating in this way the participation of those who do not normally have a voice, the Internet would also reduce political inequalities at different levels (Ayres 1999; Cotta et al. 2004: 256; Myers 2000). From this point of view, the Internet is considered to increase not only the amount of information available, but also the pluralism of sources and contents. However, as underlined by Garrett in his recent review on the state of the art of the studies on Internet and collective actors “what is absent in the literature is the empirical analysis of the negative consequences of new ICTs” (2006: 218).

First of all, skeptics (e.g. Coleman 2003, 2005; Margolis and Resnick 2000) have pointed out that the Internet could reduce citizens’ participation instead of increasing it. For example, it has been said that virtual participation could risk obscuring and substituting (therefore decreasing) real participation. In addition the ‘equalizing’ effects of the Internet have also been called into question, underlining that this new medium could favor organizations and people already rich in resources and committed in politics (Margolis and Resnick 2000 quoted in Mosca 2007: 2). Following this reasoning, emphasis has been therefore put on the possibility that media of the contemporary age and their new channel of the “virtual marketplace” would empower those elites able to use the new tools of communication (Cotta et al. 2004: 256). Those supporting this approach stress that technology is accessible only to the few (i.e. is connectivity really so ubiquitous? Who has access?) and call attention to “the dangers of the emergence of another exclusive and elitist public, not much different from the bourgeois public sphere” (i.e. how does Internet usage correlate with other demographic or social class variables such as gender, age, occupation, income, level of education, and so on? Bruszt et al. 2005: 150). In this regard, some authors suggest that innovation of the Internet stays only in its technology, while often “rather than using the virtual world to explore new ideas and possibilities, we remain creatures of habit and convention” (Hindman 2009; Street 2011: 268).

For what concerns pluralism, there are no doubts that the Internet has increased the amount of information (in terms of quantity) and has made access to it easier. By disseminating alternative information and by creating a new open space for debate, the Internet has been seen as opening opportunities for public communication for media-activists who seek to criticize, create and redefine forms and media content (Klinenberg 2005). However, some skepticism has arisen on the quality of interactions through the web (della Porta and Mosca 2006: 532) as well as of the information available on the Internet. A big issue therefore emerged: is Internet communication able to overcome social and/or ideological barriers? (Rucht 2005, quoted in Mosca 2007: 2; Sunstein 2001). Shulman (2009, quoted in Karpf 2012: 171), for example, argues that online mobilization results largely in “comments by the public of low quality, redundant and generally superficial.” On the one hand, it is true that the Internet allows “the construction of new public spheres where social movements can organize mobilizations, discuss and negotiate their claims, strengthen their identities, sensitize the public opinion and directly express acts of dissent” (Mosca 2007: 2). On the other hand, as noted with reference to ‘social capital,’ such processes do not necessarily foster the emergence of ‘collective goods.’ Being composed of all the social resources which ‘help to do things’—namely those aspects of social structures which facilitate the action—“[social capital] does not bring automatically to ‘harmony’ and social integration, but it can also favor conflict and be reinforced by them” (Foley and Edwards 1997: 551). As scholars have started to talk about “bad social capital” in order to underline that the external outcomes of associational activities are not always positive (Berman 1997; Coleman 1990), similarly concerning the Internet, observers have begun to doubt the positive effects of it. In particular, the risk of a sort of “balkanization” of the Web is underlined, with a tendency for Web users to get in contact only within ideologically homogeneous groups (Cotta et al. 2004: 257; della Porta and Mosca 2009). In sum, if the empowering potential of the Internet is obvious, and the democratic ‘equalizing’ and ‘normalizing’ effects are still under debate, the necessity to study also the undesirable effects of it is called for, since as stated “there are numerous theoretical arguments regarding the ways in which technologies could contribute to social ills, including violent conflict escalations, overwhelming flows of misinformation, and political polarization” (Garrett 2006: 217–218). Some scholars, though still at a theoretical level, even suggest alarming scenarios according to which “politically extreme online communities mobilize participants to socially detrimental actions” (Sunstein 2001, quoted in Wojcieszak 2009: 564). As argued the new technologies, above all the Internet, could have many effects at the same time and “it is more correct to assume that they could reinforce and weaken democracy, as ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Extreme Right Organizations and the Internet: An Introduction
• 2 ‘Technological’, Political and Cultural Opportunities for the Extreme Right in the United States and the European Countries
• 3 The Organizational Structure of the (Online) Galaxy of the European and American Extreme Right
• 4 Extreme Right Groups and the Internet: Construction of Identity and Source of Mobilization
• 5 Between Real and Virtual: Strategies of Action of the Extreme Right Outside the Web
• 6 Conclusion: Challenges and Opportunities of the Internet for Right-Wing Organizations
• Appendix
• References
• Index