Welcome to Gab Alt Right Discourses

TL;DR

This study analyzes thematic content on Gab, a social media platform for the alt right, using structural topic modeling on a large dataset to understand key discourses and their implications for online politics.

Contribution

It provides a detailed thematic analysis of Gab posts, identifying 85 topics and examining factors influencing their prevalence, which is a novel empirical investigation of alt right discourse content.

Findings

Key topics include Holocaust authenticity, red pill meaning, and media critique.

Account bot flags and follower counts influence topic prevalence.

Insights inform ethical content moderation and online community strategies.

Abstract

Social media has become an important venue for diverse groups to share information, discuss political issues, and organize social movements. Recent scholarship has shown that the social media ecosystem can affect political thinking and expression. Individuals and groups across the political spectrum have engaged in the use of these platforms extensively, even creating their own forums with varying approaches to content moderation in pursuit of freer standards of speech. The Gab social media platform arose in this context. Gab is a social media platform for the so-called alt right, and much of the popular press has opined about the thematic content of discourses on Gab and platforms like it, but little research has examined the content itself. Using a publicly available dataset of all Gab posts from August 2016 until July 2019, the current paper explores a five percent random sample of this dataset to explore thematic content on the platform. We run multiple structural topic models, using standard procedures to arrive at an optimal k number of topics. The final model specifies 85 topics for 403,469 documents. We include as prevalence variables whether the source account has been flagged as a bot and the number of followers for the source account. Results suggest the most nodal topics in the dataset pertain to the authenticity of the Holocaust, the meaning of red pill, and the journalistic merit of mainstream media. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for work in ethical content moderation, online community development, political polarization, and avenues for future research.