The University of Southern Mississippi The Aquila Digital Community Master's Theses Fall 12-1-2020 Hate Speech, Habitus, and Identity Signaling on 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Board Jonathon Geiger Follow this and additional works at: https://aquila.usm.edu/masters_theses Part of the Linguistic Anthropology Commons, Other Anthropology Commons, and the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Geiger, Jonathon, "Hate Speech, Habitus, and Identity Signaling on 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Board" (2020). Master's Theses. 772. https://aquila.usm.edu/masters_theses/772 This Masters Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by The Aquila Digital Community. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of The Aquila Digital Community. For more information, please contact [email protected]. HATE SPEECH, HABITUS, AND IDENTITY SIGNALING ON 4CHAN’S POLITICALLY INCORRECT BOARD by Jonathon Marshall Geiger A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate School, the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Social Science and Global Studies at The University of Southern Mississippi in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Approved by: Dr. Bridget Hayden, Committee Chair Dr. Marie Danforth Dr. Katie Smith December 2020 COPYRIGHT BY Jonathon Marshall Geiger 2020 Published by the Graduate School ABSTRACT Websites, such as 4chan, have provided a place for extremism and hate speech to flourish through anonymous discourse. One group that has been especially important to this growth has been the alt-right. The alt-right is a far-right white nationalist movement that is known for engaging in trolling, creating memes, and generating conspiracy theories. Past research has focused on the amounts of hate speech and characterizing content on the website. However, past studies have not looked at the experience of using the website through the combination of participant observation and content analysis. Here I show that the extensive use of hate speech on the politically incorrect board of 4chan is used primarily to signal identity. However, constant engagement with the content normalizes these patterns of speech. I found that many words that are considered hate speech were used to signal belonging, complicating the findings of past studies that count the usage of hate speech to characterize the content of the website. Despite this usage, I found that constant engagement with the content normalized content from the site and increased my conspiratorial thinking. This study demonstrates the complexity of researching those with whom we disagree, highlighting the importance of empathetic research that considers both the intentions of those studied as well as the consequences of their actions. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Dr. Bridget Hayden for her extensive work reading and commenting on the many drafts that it took to complete this thesis. Her extensive patience, motivation, and immense knowledge were crucial to completing the research. Dr. Hayden has been the best advisor I could have asked for, both pushing me and encouraging me when I needed it most. I would also like to thank the rest of my committee, Dr. Marie Danforth and Dr. Katie Smith, for their encouragement, comments, and questions that have enhanced the final product. Additionally, I want to thank Dr. Mark Brockway’s guidance in designing my sampling methods. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................ ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iii LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................ vii CHAPTER I -Introduction .................................................................................................. 1 Alt-right........................................................................................................................... 1 News Usage .................................................................................................................... 6 4chan ............................................................................................................................... 7 Questions......................................................................................................................... 8 CHAPTER II -Literature Review ..................................................................................... 11 Alt-Right ....................................................................................................................... 11 Anxiety in the Alt-Right ........................................................................................... 13 Class and Racial Anxiety Within the Alt-Right .................................................... 14 Class and Gender Anxieties Within the Alt-Right ................................................ 16 Online Behavior of the Alt-Right ............................................................................. 18 Conspiracy ............................................................................................................ 19 Trolling ................................................................................................................. 22 Memes ................................................................................................................... 23 Interpreting Online Behavior .................................................................................... 25 Practice Theory ............................................................................................................. 27 iv Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 31 CHAPTER III – Methods ................................................................................................. 33 Place .............................................................................................................................. 33 Defining Place ........................................................................................................... 33 4chan ......................................................................................................................... 36 Ethics............................................................................................................................. 38 Data Collection ............................................................................................................. 41 Analysis..................................................................................................................... 43 Qualitative Discourse Analysis ............................................................................. 43 Quantitative Content Analysis .............................................................................. 45 Reflexive Journal .................................................................................................. 47 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 48 CHAPTER IV -FINDINGS .............................................................................................. 49 Interaction on The Politically Incorrect Board ............................................................. 49 Creating Identity ....................................................................................................... 49 Specialized knowledge.......................................................................................... 50 Language Patterns ................................................................................................. 51 Distrust of Media and Government....................................................................... 53 Anxieties ................................................................................................................... 56 Racial and Class Anxiety ...................................................................................... 57 v Gender Anxiety ..................................................................................................... 59 Practices .................................................................................................................... 60 Conspiracy. ........................................................................................................... 60 Trolling ................................................................................................................. 62 Memes ................................................................................................................... 63 Reflexive Journal ...................................................................................................... 67 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 69 CHAPTER V –CONCLUSION ........................................................................................ 71 Discussion and Conclusions ......................................................................................... 71 Identity ...................................................................................................................... 71 Information Seeking.................................................................................................