Description
At this point we wanted to look for the presence of the Alt-Right, a white supremacist movement that gained popularity with the Trump election, on actors’ Facebook pages in order to detect the participation of extremists in the debate: we chose this movement for the particularly sectorial language they use, and because of the fact that according to our previous analysis on the actors, different actors of our research appeared related to the Alt-Right. We searched for the vocabulary developed by the Alt Right to avoid the censorship, and after collecting and comparing the terms we selected those found on Rational Wiki. The site provides a list of 100 words. In order to reach more specifically the Alt-Right, we selected the most punctual terms that could be more representative of the extremist lexicon and more divergent from the common language. Starting from this list we searched the terms of the glossary in the comments of the actors’ Facebook pages in order to locate the presence of Alt-Right in their pages and what kind of terms they use the most. The visualization shows a strong presence of the Alt-Right in Milo Yiannopoulos' Facebook page both in the total rate of the terms and in the Alt-Right presence index, that is the ratio between the total number of the terms in the comments and the total number of the comments. We noticed also a strong divergence of UC Berkeley results, that in the first graph is one of those with less Alt-Right comments and in the second graph is one of the actors with the highest Alt-Right presence index.
Noticing from the results the effective large presence of the Alt-Right, we decided to analyze this particular movement starting from an in-depth analysis conducted by the Professor Florian Cramer, who identified where the Alt-Right is active on the web. We used the websites mentioned by Cramer as seeds to create a network within the Alt-Right websites and the other platforms. Looking to the visualization it is visible the predominance of the social networks as the most related platforms.
Protocol
Find a reliable source of the most used terms by the Alt-Right.
Search for these terms with Netvizz within the top 200 comments on the actors’ Facebook pages.
Select the most punctual and particular terms.
Define the most used terms for each actor.
Create the Alt-Right presence index with the ratio between the total number of the terms in the comments and the total number of the comments.
Create the visualization using Raw and Illustrator.
Find an exhaustive list of the Alt-Right websites.
Use Touchgraph in order to identify the networks between the websites in the list and other platforms.
Make the common platforms emerge within the network in Illustrator.