[Air-L] Request for literature on populist exploitation of outrage online

[Stuart Shulman]

Hopefully videos from recovering academics count as "the literature" in
2022. I have just started looking at the strong presence of far-right
nationalists from the US in the "Trucker Convoy" discussions taking place
on Twitter about events in Ottawa. It looks like a QAnon convention
in parts of the Twitter data (minus the banned slogans) with the militant
and/or theocratic white nationalists openly engaged in the most extreme
forms of agitation. It is a transnational white nationalist movement. They
destroy the old inward white nationalism replacing it with Internet-enabled
cross national incivility, racism, and insurrectionism.

AmericaFirst Nationalism
https://vimeo.com/showcase/8653643

We Need to Talk About Gab
https://vimeo.com/showcase/8704426

Gettr Promotion on Twitter
https://vimeo.com/showcase/9113601

Dr. Stuart Shulman



On Sun, Feb 6, 2022 at 9:08 AM Yvesmichelet via Air-L <
air-l at listserv.aoir.org> wrote:

> Hi
>
> I have a request for literature about how populists exploit outrage in
> order to spread their message and reach new audiences.
>
> In brief, there is this opinion piece by Ryan Holiday
>
>
> https://observer.com/2017/02/i-helped-create-the-milo-trolling-playbook-you-should-stop-playing-right-into-it/
>
> Which states:
>
> The key tactic of alternative or provocative figures is to leverage the
> size and platform of their “not-audience” (i.e. their haters in the
> mainstream) to attract attention and build an actual audience. Let’s say 9
> out of 10 people who hear something Milo says will find it repulsive and
> juvenile. Because of that response rate, it’s going to be hard for someone
> like Milo to market himself through traditional channels. His potential
> audience is too spread out, and doesn’t have that much in common. He can’t
> advertise, he can’t find them one by one. It’s just not going to scale.
>
> But let’s say he can acquire massive amounts of negative publicity by
> pissing off people in the media? Well now all of a sudden someone is
> absorbing the cost of this inefficient form of marketing for him. If a CNN
> story reaches 100,000 people, that’s 90,000 people all patting themselves
> on the back for how smart and decent they are. They’re just missing the
> fact that the 10,000 new people that just heard about Milo for the first
> time. The same goes for when you angrily share on Facebook some godawful
> thing one of these people has said. The vast majority of your friends rush
> to agree, but your younger cousin has a dark switch in his brain go on for
> the first time.
>
> I wanted to ask - are there any academic studies on this aspect of
> exploiting outrage, e.g. on twitter or facebook? So far I haven`t found
> anything!
>
> Thanks
>
> Yves
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