Seeking to understand how racist content circulates on Twitter, we identified several repeated phrases, or memes – ‘diversity is a code’, ‘diversity means chasing down’, ‘antiwhites deny white genocide’, ‘genocide in South Africa’, ‘woke go broke’, and ‘woke mind virus’ – that use social justice terminology and span from general conservatism to white nationalism. Despite apparently disparate rhetoric in the memes, they had shared users and topics of discussion, leading us to investigate how ideas and people circulate across both ideological and social media networks. In this article, we analyze the network structure of who tweeted these memes and whether they were widespread or concentrated, conduct a content analysis of their shared topics, and use discourse analysis to unpack the ideologies they represent. We argue that these tweets that package conservative ideology into memes using progressive terminology provide a window into how users and ideas travel across right-wing networks, gaining traction and visibility by reusing and remixing these phrases.
AllenNDC (2023) The misappropriation of “woke”: discriminatory social media practices, contributory injustice and context collapse. Synthese202(3): 84.
AskaniusT (2021) On frogs, monkeys, and execution memes: exploring the humor-hate nexus at the intersection of neo-nazi and alt-right movements in Sweden. Television & New Media22(2): 147–165.
6.
Banet-WeiserSKayJB (2025) Through the looking glass: feminism and reactionary politics in the digital hall of mirrors. European Journal of Cultural Studies. DOI: 10.1177/13675494241310721.
7.
BastianMHeymannSJacomyM (2009) Gephi: an open source software for exploring and manipulating networks. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media3(1). 1: 361–362.
8.
BravemanPAArkinEProctorD, et al. (2022) Systemic and structural racism: definitions, examples, health damages, and approaches to dismantling: study examines definitions, examples, health damages, and dismantling systemic and structural racism. Health Affairs41(2): 171–178.
9.
BrownKMondonAWinterA (2023) The far right, the mainstream and mainstreaming: towards a heuristic framework. Journal of Political Ideologies28(2): 162–179.
CarneyN (2016) All lives matter, but so does race: Black lives matter and the evolving role of social media. Humanity & Society40(2): 180–199.
12.
ChancellorSPaterJAClearT, et al. (2016) #thyghgapp: instagram content moderation and lexical variation in pro-eating disorder communities. In: Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. New York, NY, USA: CSCW ’16. Association for Computing Machinery, 1201–1213. DOI: 10.1145/2818048.2819963 (accessed 8 March 2023).
13.
ChaudhryI (2015) #Hashtagging hate: using Twitter to track racism online. First Monday20(2).
14.
CisnerosJDNakayamaTK (2015) New media, old racisms: twitter, miss America, and cultural logics of race. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication8(2): 108–127.
CohenS (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics. Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge.
17.
DeCookJR (2018) Memes and symbolic violence: #proudboys and the use of memes for propaganda and the construction of collective identity. Learning, Media and Technology43(4): 485–504.
18.
DeCookJR (2020) Trust me, I’m trolling: irony and the alt-right’s political aesthetic. M/C Journal23(3): n.p.
19.
DeemA (2019) The digital traces of #whitegenocide and alt-right affective economies of transgression. International Journal of Communication13(0): 20.
20.
DemšarJCurkTErjavecA, et al. (2013) Orange: data mining toolbox in Python. Journal of Machine Learning Research14: 2349–2353.
EkmanM (2022) The great replacement: strategic mainstreaming of far-right conspiracy claims. Convergence: The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies28(4): 1127–1143.
HartzellSL (2018) Alt-white: conceptualizing the ‘alt-right’ as a rhetorical bridge between white nationalism and mainstream public discourse. Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric8(1/2): 6–25.
35.
HartzellSL (2020) Whiteness feels good here: interrogating white nationalist rhetoric on Stormfront. Communication and Critical17(2): 129–148.
36.
HokkaJ (2021) PewDiePie, racism and Youtube’s neoliberalist interpretation of freedom of speech. Convergence: The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies27(1): 142–160.
LawsonCE (2018) Platform vulnerabilities: harassment and misogynoir in the digital attack on Leslie Jones. Information, Communication & Society21(6): 818–833.
MarksRStanfillM (2023) Methodological Solutions for the Challenges of Studying Racist Communication on Social Media. In: Proceedings of the 41st ACM International Conference on Design of Communication,New York, NY, USA, 26 October 2023 pp. 70–76. SIGDOC ’23. Association for Computing Machinery. Available at:https://doi.org/10.1145/3615335.3623013.
42.
MassanariALChessS (2018) Attack of the 50-foot social justice warrior: the discursive construction of SJW memes as the monstrous feminine. Feminist Media Studies18(4): 525–542.
43.
Matamoros-FernándezA (2018) Inciting anger through Facebook reactions in Belgium: the use of emoji and related vernacular expressions in racist discourse. First Monday, Epub ahead of print 1 September 2018. DOI: 10.5210/fm.v23i9.9405.
44.
Miller-IdrissC (2022) Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right. Princeton University Press.
45.
OrbeM (2015) #AllLivesMatter as post-racial rhetorical strategy. Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric5(3/4): 90–98.
StanfillM (2024) Fandom Is Ugly: Networked Harassment in Participatory Culture. NYU Press.
53.
TarvinEStanfillM (2022) “YouTube’s predator problem”: platform moderation as governance-washing, and user resistance. Convergence: The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies28(3): 822–837.
TopinkaRJ (2018) Politically incorrect participatory media: racist nationalism on r/ImGoingToHellForThis. New Media & Society20(5): 2050–2069.
59.
TriceMPottsL (2018) Building dark patterns into platforms: how GamerGate perturbed Twitter’s user experience. Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society6(3): 1–10.
