Standing Up for Sweden? The Racist Discourses, Architectures and Affordances of an Anti-Immigration Facebook Group

Abstract

Facebook has faced growing criticism regarding its handling of hateful user-generated content (UGC) with research revealing how the platform can foster both covert and overt racism. This research has tended to focus on racist content while relying on abstract references to the general logics of social media platforms. In this article we consider how Facebook shapes the production of racist discourse in more concrete ways by integrating a concern for the platform’s architectures and affordances within a broader analysis of the immigration-related discussions of a large Swedish Facebook group. We combine a quantitative topic modeling of a large data set of the group’s UGC with a qualitative critical discourse analysis (CDA) of a sample of that data set. Our findings show how Facebook enables and influences various discursive strategies of identification and persuasion—within which covert and overt racist discourses are embedded—through processes of cybertyping, role-playing, crowdsourcing and (counter-)reaction.

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