For the radical right, it is important to attract new members on the Internet, presenting itself as bigger, more influential, more powerful, and more entertaining than it actually is. In order to achieve this, it is important for its adherents to maintain and perpetuate a specific perception of themselves – outwards, to attract new users, but also inwards, in order to maintain existing identity structures and indoctrinate new users. The recent fiasco with the publication of the Handbook of Hate Memes is a shining example of how radical right-wing digital communities, such as the one on 4chan's /pol/ (Politically Incorrect) subforum, are doing just that through mythologization.
4chan is an internet forum launched in 2003 to give internet users a space to discuss anime cartoons. Soon the discussion spread to other topics. Today, the forum is composed of more than 70 sub-forums, each of them dedicated to one topic (for example sports, literature, music and video games). The specificity of the forum is that all users and discussions are anonymous, making it impossible to differentiate users and cultivate personal reputation; also, all forum content is transitory as it is deleted shortly after posting, keeping the forum and users in a perpetual state of chaos and rebirth. Despite these conditions, each subforum has its own lively community of users, who share a common vision of the meaning of the subforum, characterized by an undefined but ever-present spirit and character that establishes rules of conduct.
The ability of 4chan users to construct and maintain stable communities and their identities, despite the aforementioned limitations, lies in their tendency to present the incoherent and chaotic actions of numerous individuals of the subforum as a single and targeted action of one being – the imagined entity of the subforum. In its construction, the perception of the community by the external group is extremely important, which is used to strengthen the coherence of its internal group. When an outgroup, which is seen as antagonistic and whose members are perceived as closely related, presents its perception of the 4chan community, its members incorporate that perception into their self-perception, which they then manifest to the outgroup as a solid entity. Thus, antagonism towards others, which in the case of 4chan are journalists, media, academic researchers, and other internet users, serves as the infrastructure on which they build their community entity. In the perpetuation of this entity, the members of the community are connected in a more stable structure, where the individual identity of the user is lost and replaced by a collective identity.
There are
several examples that show how 4chan communities have cultivated and developed their entity using this method. In the early 2000s, the /b/ (Random) subforum community was marked by trolling activities – the use of any means to anger or deceive others for the amusement of the troll and his audience – in which a large number of members participated. The gradual spread of troll activities and the increasingly important profiles of victims of trolling activities led to a sudden increase in media exposure of 4chan, which was declared by Fox News as an “Internet hate machine” and by CNN as a “notorious hacker”. The /b/ community used such a (simplified) external perception of 4chan to link previous incoherent activities into a mythologized community entity, pushed into the public to perpetuate further media (but also Internet) perception of 4chan, which served to stimulate awe towards the forum, but also interest of the other potential users to join.The above-mentioned example served to establish the /b/ community entity, which, despite its unacceptable content and emphasis on trolling activities, was mostly devoid of ideological beliefs. However, a subforum like /pol/ is fundamentally defined by its alt-right political sentiment, which makes the mythologizing of user actions and the establishment of community entities dangerous for democratic societies. And that’s exactly what happened when the European Observatory of Online Hate (EOOH) announced on July 7th, 2022, the publication of the Handbook of Hate Memes. On their Twitter profile, they boasted of its interdisciplinary approach, which was supposed to produce an educational guide for understanding radical right-wing memes (digital units of culture in the form of images, sounds and videos, most often of a humorous nature). The publication was also accompanied by a link to a Google form, through which anyone could request access to the digital version of the publication.
However, instead of the publication enabling the interested public, experts, politicians and journalists to be educated about radical right internet memes, it became a source of entertainment for the digital public and a means of connection for the radical right digital community. The publication was first mocked by Twitter users, causing EOOH to delete the original post. But the real problem arose on July 15, 2022, when it was discovered by the radical right-wing digital communities (like 4chan). Having successfully acquired a digital version of the publication, their members began to independently share it on the Internet, highlighting it as a hall of fame collection of their best content. Not only did EOOH thereby lose control over the publication's dissemination, but its role also changed; instead of educating about the dangers of radical internet communities, the publication was recontextualized to glorify radical right memes.
Discussions about the publication provide an insight into the microcosm of the broader sentiment of the /pol/ community and its resistance to the dominant political culture, its response to media-research attention, and its construction of a collective entity by mythologizing its actions. Commenting on the publication, users of /pol/ ridiculed the quality and shallowness of the research through 3 discussions (700 posts in total), commented on factual errors and the absence of certain important memes, and questioned the researcher's motivation for conducting the research, which can be seen from the following three examples of discourse:
Nice to see that government think tanks are still as stupid as ever. They're either purposefully making shit up and misrepresenting things to push an agenda, or they're so stupid they believe this shit.
i hope one of my memes made it in im putting that shit on my resume
It is important to emphasize that users mythologized the activities of the 4chan community in these discussions. By defining the authors of the publication as close-knit members of the political elite of the dominant progressive-liberal political worldview, whose aim is to stifle freedom of thought and speech, users have (re)incorporated the external perception of /pol/ into their self-perception, mythologizing their previous actions as a coherent reaction of a collective entity, which opposes seemingly antagonistic external groups:
never underestimate your enemy. This whole thing is done to sway the clueless normie and give the Hague something to point to as evidence you are the most hitler that ever hitlered. Every book published becomes more Appeals to Authority when the time comes that they think they will round up the hate meme'ers.
i agree governments shouldn't take you losers seriously. They should, since we've done everything from getting Russian laser-guided bombs to hit ISIS targets in Syria, to getting Trump elected. We also cracked Hunter Biden's phone and revealed father and son were illegally conducting business in Ukraine, not that it matter because no one will bring the law down on them.
It is clear that the publication had good intentions – the goal was to educate society about the dangers of radical right-wing Internet content, which hides its political ideas behind a veil of humor and irony. However, it became a tool of the radical right, which led to an inversion of its effect. Not only did it enable the radical right to more effectively disseminate its content and critique of contemporary politics (and the credibility of the attempts to research 4chan), but it also enabled it to use the imposed external perception of its character and actions in order to mythologize its previous actions and maintain the entity of the /pol/ subforum. Through it, they can continue to spread the “legend” about their impact and action, attract new members of the community more easily, but also connect existing members. The danger in attracting new members lies in the seemingly harmless and satirical nature of such content. Initially, these members will be interested in trolling activities, ridiculing dominant social ideas and positions, and the conflicting nature of community versus society, which is realized through the creation, dissemination and consumption of “ironic” content, but in all these activities, the process of normalization of such ideas will be carried out in the background and, ultimately, their internalization.
As previously stated, 4chan is characterized by anonymity and fluid identities and values. Therefore, the identity and values of each subforum community are in a constant state of chaos and at risk of being replaced by others. That is why it is crucial to maintain the mythologized interpretation of one’s previous actions as a series of coherent and stable reactions of the same “being”, in order for the current dominant identity to survive. If the members of the /pol/ community did not act that way, it would be impossible for the alt-right sentiment of /pol/ to survive that long.
