[Air-L] Research on the Web Presence of the Alt-Right in the US

[Thomas Main]

Hi All:

I am writing a book on the Alt-Right movement in the US. I am looking at many aspects of the movement including the size and nature of the audience for its websites. The question I wish to address is whether the Alt-Right is such a small fringe movement that it merits no serious attention, or is the movement large enough in some sense to have an impact on American political culture.

Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly-among others-has made this argument in a recently aired segment on the Hard Core Alt-Right, or the “white power” movement as he called it. (http://www.politicususa.com/2016/11/29/bill-oreilly-white-power-movement-storyline-doesnt-exist.html) The gist was that the movement was extremely small. O’Reilly pointed out that a recent Washington DC press conference held by Hard Core Alt-Righter Richard Spencer drew only about 275 participants but 50 journalists; that there are only a few thousand hate crimes committed in the US each year; and that most Trump supporters aren’t racists. O’Reilly’s conclusion: the white power people are idiots but so few in number as to be unimportant; they are getting attention only because the liberal media wants to discredit Trump.


In collaboration with Richard D. Holowczak, Associate Professor of Computer Information Systems in the Zicklin School of Business, I have already looked at visits to Alt-Right web sites from May to October 2016. Our analysis suggests that O’Reilly’s claims are correct as far as they go but not to the point. The Hard Core leaders and immediate followers are few in number, but then the core of an intellectual movement is always small; neoconservatism and the New Left are examples. A relatively small “elite” develops ideas, arguments, and research that are passed down through an intellectual food chain to policy entrepreneurs, party operatives, media figures, and finally the public. What counts is not the absolute size of a given elite and its immediate followers, but the depth of the penetration of that core group’s output into mainstream political culture relative to the penetration of rival groups.

If we accept that model our analysis of website visits suggests the Alt-Right may have achieved a toe-hold in American political culture. Consider that:
●In terms of recent website visits Breitbart News is far larger and has grown much faster than all mainstream conservative outlets-which include the National Review, the Weekly Standard, and Commentary-combined. From May to October 2016 Breitbart News averaged 82.5 million visits a month and grew by 94.4 percent, while all mainstream conservative sites combined averaged 46 million visits a month and grew by 13.7 percent
●All Hard Core Alt-Right websites combined got on average about 3 million visits a month and grew by about 17.7 percent over the last six months.
●The Hard Core American Renaissance, for example, with a 6-month average of 708 thousand visits and a growth rate of 35.8 is larger than such well-known liberal platforms as the American Prospect, Ms. and The Progressive.
These findings are suggestive and may indicate that the Alt-Right, judged in terms of web presence, may be large enough to have some cultural or political impact. But there are obvious limitations to our research so far:
●Our website visit data go back only six months only. Thus we know nothing about longer term trends.
●We have data on website visits only, not unique visitors. If one person accesses a website five times in a day we have five visits but only one unique visitor. Ideally we should look at both visits and visitors.
●So far our sample of websites includes only 60 political opinion sites. We need to look at many more sites and different types of sites including outlets for news media, research centers, and social movements.
●We need a more systematic and objective method for classifying sites by political orientation.
●Our data tell us nothing about demographics and viewing habits of site visitors. Thus we are not able to distinguish between visits by Alt-Right sympathizers, curiosity seekers, and adversaries doing opposition research.
I am about to purchase better web-traffic data from SimilarWeb. I would like to correspond with other researchers on ways to overcome the limitations of my work so far.
Thanks for your attention.
Cheers,

Thomas J. Main
Professor
Marxe School of Public and International Affairs
Baruch College, City University of New York
One Bernard Baruch Way
Box D-0901
New York, NY 10010-5585
T: 646-660-6719
F: 646-660-6701
Office: 135 East 22nd Street, Room 912
thomas.main at baruch.cuny.edu<mailto:thomas.main at baruch.cuny.edu>
Web Site: http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/spa/faculty-and-staff/full-time-faculty/thomas-main.html