Periodic Reporting for period 2 - RADICALISATION (‘We’re not neo-Nazis anymore’: Radicalisation strategies in online far-right propaganda and disinformation campaigns)
Reporting period: 2022-04-15 to 2023-04-14
The European Union (EU) faces a high-level security threat by the uncontrolled spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories, which has led to a significant increase in political extremism, anti-expert discourses, and increasing authoritarianism. This project explores disinformation campaigns in relation to (1) far- and extreme right radicalization strategies, (2) disinformation related to climate change, specifically ecofascism and (3) information warfare. Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), corpus linguistics, forensic linguistics, Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) and open-source intelligence (OSINT), this project employs both quantitative and qualitative methods in a multidisciplinary approach to explore the linguistic construction of disinformation tactics, focusing specifically on dis/alignment, attitudes, values, emotions, moral judgements and criminogenic intent in radicalisation strategies and disinformation campaigns. Tactics within strategic narratives of disinformation campaigns were found to rely on the linguistic resources of attitude, persuasion, amplification and obligation. Specifically, linguistic markers of ecofascist rhetoric include branding non-white populations as ‘invading foreigners’ and ‘parasites’ and local minorities as ‘foreign species’. Disinformation tactics in information warfare were studied in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its links to far- and extreme right radicalization. Findings reveal that such tactics are deployed in order to lay the groundwork for military intervention: in Syria, to justify Russian presence by claiming to fight ‘international terrorism’, and in Ukraine, to fight ‘Nazis’ and ‘extremists’. Despite the threat disinformation poses, government and law enforcement agencies continue to approach this problem from a reactive information operations and cybersecurity perspective rather than a proactive educational perspective. Therefore, there is an urgent need to counter the effect of disinformation by integrating critical digital literacy and multimodal discourse studies into educational curricula.
Computer-assisted digital text analyses conducted for this project were based on data harvested and stored using the corpus linguistics software Sketch Engine, which enabled both automated quantitative and qualitative analyses of recurring linguistic patterns in their context in the collected corpus of more than 11 million words. These analyses reveal a number of recurring themes. Ecofascist rhetoric was found to rely on the linguistic resources of attitude, persuasion, amplification and obligation. Ecofascist ideas are typically clustered together with old Nazi tropes and familiar white supremacist grievances such as immigration, multiculturalism, liberalism and cultural Marxism (among others), constructed as violations of the ‘natural order’, exploitation of natural resources and ‘white genocide’. Disinformation tactics in information warfare reveal that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has divided the Western far- and the extreme right, from the support of neo-Nazi foreign fighters to the criticism of the war ‘between white brothers’. Information tactics used in Ukraine were compared to tactics in previous interventions, such as Syria. Recurring linguistic patterns also construct information tactics that condemn the United States, the European Union and NATO as ‘terrorist recruiters’, ‘civilian killers’, ‘failed states’ as the ‘declining West’ collectively, and praise Russia as a ‘terrorist slayer’, a ‘humanitarian’, and a ‘global superpower’. These findings are especially relevant in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the security of the European Union because studying the information space can predict the possibility of future invasions. The results of this project have been widely disseminated via peer-reviewed and open-access publications, conference keynote and research presentations and public outreach activities. The most important publication on this research is a forthcoming monograph, contracted by Bloomsbury, titled: The language of ecofascist propaganda: Greenwashing white supremacy. In A. Stibbe, & M. Roccia (Series Eds.), Bloomsbury Advances in Ecolinguistics. Bloomsbury.
Most countries to date do not have critical digital and media literacy, fact-checking, and online safety education (e.g. how social media and algorithms work) embedded in their national curriculum. This poses significant challenges for teachers who aim to develop critical thinking and media literacy skills in their classes: many existing initiatives are designed as extra-curricular and isolated interventions, many schools lack the necessary resources, most teachers have not received any training to deal with the spread of ‘fake news’ or to identify the signs of extremist radicalization, and the general curriculum does not allocate sufficient time to include these topics. Critical digital and media literacy education should be a compulsory part of formal national school curricula, in order to equip student with critical thinking skills as well as knowledge about language to identify the functions of linguistic resources disinformation campaigns, for example, the construction of emotions and attitudes, provocation, othering, manipulation and persuasion. To build resiliency to disinformation and extremist propaganda, in order to be effective, media literacy education needs to equip students with the skills to identify how such discourses embed multimodal forms of visual communication, memetic warfare, manipulated images and deepfakes into propaganda. At the university level, educating future teachers will also require that universities move beyond academic tribes and disciplinary silos. It will require offering a multi-disciplinary education that equips students with the ability to approach very complex problems from different angles from the perspectives of multiple disciplines.