Investigating the far-right online: Using text data to understand online subcultures

Abstract

This contribution provides an introduction for social science researchers on the use of computational methods within investigative research for analysing large text corpora to develop an understanding of online communities and subcultures. It offers a case study of the MineChans project, which utilised such methods in investigating the relationship between the online discussions on a collection of anonymous image-board forums, including 4chan and 8chan, and real-world, offline, attacks by right-wing extremists, making these forums a radicalising milieu. While these analytical techniques are new, they are actually fairly easy for social researchers to implement due to the nature of contemporary high-level programming languages such as Python.