How Right-Wing Populists Engage with Cross-Cutting News on Online Message Boards: The Case of ForoCoches and Vox in Spain

Anecdotal evidence suggests a link between online message boards and the rise of far-right movements, which have achieved growing electoral success globally. Press accounts and scholarship have suggested these message boards help to radicalize like-minded users through exposure to shared media insulated from cross-cutting viewpoints (e.g., Hine et al. 2017 ; Palmer 2019). To better understand what role online message boards might play for supporters of right-wing populist movements, we focus on the Spanish political party Vox and its supporters’ use of the message board ForoCoches, a fan site for car enthusiasts, which became an important platform for the party. Using more than 120,000 messages collected from threads mentioning the party between 2013–2019, we examine the URLs shared to show how mainstream news media events shape the conversation online and how users not only were exposed but deeply engaged with cross-cutting news sources. We argue that the use of sites such as ForoCoches should be viewed in the context of a broader increasingly hybrid political and media landscape where activity online and offline cannot be understood separate from one another. Moreover, our findings suggest that the online political discussions that take place in Vox-related threads on ForoCoches resemble normatively positive deliberative spaces—albeit in this case in support of illiberal political positions. In other words, our findings complicate conventional notions about the benefits of political talk, especially online, as a democratically desirable end in and of itself.

Inner Mongolian Online Identity

In the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region (IMAR) of China, herders and settled youth from herding communities are utilizing online message boards to build new communities, network across international borders, and negotiate what it means to be from a herding community in modern-day China. This chapter examines the ways that local and international supporters recorded and debated about a 2012 road protest during which a herder was run over and dragged to his death by a mining truck. Focusing on the use of ICTs by rural citizens, this chapter finds that herders were able to publish their own narratives in real time, often challenging narratives presented by the state. Additionally, through these narratives, youth in IMAR identified with and expressed a herding tradition and identity, even while living largely settled lives.

Racial folklore, black masculinities and the reproduction of dominant racial ideologies: The case of Israel Folau

This article examines the continued presence of racial folklore and the reproduction of dominant racial ideologies as presented by the media and fan interactions. The case of Israel (Izzy) Folau’s time at the Greater Western Sydney Giants Australian football club is presented, utilising an analysis of the club’s email communications, media coverage and discussions by sports fans on online message boards. The analysis identifies the significance of the player’s racialised body in constructions of masculinity and the extent to which it plays a role in the acceptance (or not) of an athlete. The article concludes that the narratives that are constructed around athletes are fluid and often change over time or in response to sporting performances or other external influences such as a change of team.

Collecting and media change, or: Listening to Phish via app

Practices of collecting are constrained by media circumstances. To show how changing media circumstances can occasion changes in collecting practices, this article explores one case study, an iOS app developed by a Phish fan to allow streaming audio of fan-made recordings of Phish concert performances. Such practices are part of a history of unofficial music collecting that parallels the history of recorded sound. This case study shows how one collecting community’s practices evolved in the context of changing media conditions: from cassette tape to CD-R to MP3 to streams (and a parallel motion from print to online message boards to app). This progression illustrates the ways that different ways of listening to and accessing recorded music afford different possibilities of collecting music, different links between listener and music, and different relationships among listeners. More precisely, Phish concert recordings, which lent themselves to collection when circulated on cassette, are no longer available to collect when they circulate as streaming media, because streaming is characterized by a relationship of access rather than possession. Among devoted fans, streaming recordings provoke a cultural emphasis on knowledge about music, rather than accumulation of recordings. My argument is rooted in prevailing theories of collecting, which situate collecting as a component of consumer culture emerging from the capitalist expansion stimulated by 19th-century mass production. Ultimately, I argue that when an object of collecting is displaced by changing media conditions, new collecting practices emerge to fill the void.

Popular Imagination Versus Historical Reality

Historical films have been subject to controversy and criticism within the discipline of history upon the rise of popular interest in new and innovative forms of historical representation. The five to seven years between the release of Gladiator (2000) and Rome (2005-2007) saw an upsurge of historical films focusing on the ‘epic’: the spectacular, monumental and immersive periods of history that exude a mix of historical reality and speculative fiction. This paper argues that it is not historical accuracy or film as historical evidence that matters, but the historical questions and debates that film raises for its audience and the historical profession regarding the past it presents and its implication on history. Such questions and debates base themselves around the extent to which filmmakers are able to interpret history through images and what kind of historical understandings it hopes to achieve. This paper analyses the complexity of public history through a comparative study of reviews on five online message boards, such as IMBD, Amazon, TV.com and Metacritic, relating to HBO’s Rome – chosen due to its unique ability of igniting historiographical debate by presenting history as an accident, thus allowing audiences to question and reinterpret the outcome of historical events. KEYWORDSHBO; Rome; Film; Historiography; Public History; Popular Imagination

Race, Battlefield 1 and the White Mythic Space of the First World War

The popular perception of the First World War has remained an inherently white mythic space in which white men fight against other white men and where minorities, when and if they are featured, are given an anonymous secondary role and are subject to the will and motivation of their white heroic leaders. This article will be considering the white mythic space of the First World War by focusing on the video game Battlefield 1 (2016) and investigating the backlash by players on online message boards against the inclusion of soldiers of color in the game’s multiplayer features. In the online discourse, these players diminish the role that minorities played in the First World War and although the presence of minorities in the historical First World War is to a minor extent acknowledged, their space in the video game is nonetheless denied. I argue that this backlash is based on a rejection of the inclusive collective memory as portrayed in Battlefield 1, supported by racist arguments against the backdrop of the white mythic space of the First World War and that their rejection of the presence of minorities in Battlefield 1 can be constructed as a continuation of the denial of agency for soldiers of color by white individuals that took place during the First World War and the postwar period.

Impassioned Communication and Virtual Support Roles of Online Postings: The Case of Self-Harmers

Although there is an emerging literature on online users support groups, limited research has focused on the online users support groups concerned with self-harm. This study reports the findings of inductive content analysis of self-harm online messages from one self-harm online users group. One hundred messages were examined. Categories were determined and inductive analysis revealed online self-harm postings showed two themes. The first theme was “impassioned communication,” 76% of the postings had this major theme. There were three subthemes included in this theme: being a “failure,” “people not understanding,” and “improvement.” The second theme was “virtual support.” Although presented as two separate themes, “impassioned communication” and “virtual support” are interrelated as some postings suggested the need for support with impassioned communication. These results support the established view that the Internet is the place where individuals can access emotional support or social integration, especially helpful for those who are, or feel, marginalized (e.g., those experiencing disenfranchised grief and self-harming). This study shows the usefulness of utilizing online message boards as a research tool for conducting research among populations that are difficult to access.