Organized Hate: The Strategic Online Rhetoric of White Nationalist Leaders
Abstract
White nationalist extremists in the United States have committed the majority of hate-fueled killings targeting non-whites and immigrants of the past decade. However, how white nationalist leaders deploy their hate rhetoric online to maintain and expand their base of support is not well understood. In this project, we collaborated with the Southern Poverty Law Center to locate the social media handles of 128 white nationalist leaders and identified their online follower network of 11,303 individuals on both Twitter and Gab, totaling 16,627,018 posts from 2016 to 2023. Preliminary analyses have revealed: (1) White nationalist leaders have played a larger role in shaping online hate speeches among individual followers than scholars previously thought, despite these speeches seeming to be sporadic and spontaneous; (2) Masculinity messages by white nationalist leaders are a powerful “gateway appeal,” attracting primarily peripheral followers into posting more racist content themselves. The funding from UCLA ISH will allow us to complete this project by: (1) Exploring the mechanism through which leaders’ masculinity messages resonate with followers and mobilize them to conduct offline hate crimes; (2) Examining the effect of counter-arguing the gateway appeals as a potential anti-hate intervention to reduce hate speeches online and eventually hate crimes offline.
Field
Political Science
Team
Dr. Luwei Ying, Dr. Carly N. Wayne
Dr. Luwei Ying
Luwei Ying is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on international relations, civil conflict, political violence, and quantitative methods. She studies how militant organizations use ideology to mobilize and control members, aligning these strategies with their military agendas. She also develops text-as-data methods to measure ideology from textual data. Additionally, she examines the importance of territorial control in conflicts involving states and non-state actors, covering topics like transnational terrorism and the historical legacies of border institutions. Her work has garnered multiple awards and is published in leading journals such as the American Political Science Review, Political Analysis, the Journal of Politics and the Journal of Conflict Resolution. She earned her Ph.D. in 2022 from Washington University in St. Louis and holds B.A. degrees in International Politics and Journalism & Communication from Tsinghua University.